happiness

Are you Content? Happy? Both?

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In an article titled “Is Contentment an Underrated Goal in Life?” By Jill Suttie | August 26, 2024. she reports on a study that “suggests contentment is a positive emotion with some unique benefits for people who seek it.“

Researcher Yang Bai summarized her research for this study this way: “Compar[ed] to other positive emotions, contentment makes us more accepting of ourselves,” and “it can bring [people] the strength to accept the good and bad sides of their lives.”

Hmph. That’s not a grumpy noise, but a startled one, as if I just sat down, exhausted, after looking all over the house for my keys and then found them in my pocket. Dedicated readers may remember my August 1, 2024 essay titled “Why Now?” where contentment is happily reported as the possible by-product of misfiring neurons and tangled, silly synapses. (Silly? Synapses, synapse, synopsis, synopses, sinopsis, et.al.)

A fun-filled debate could be had about whether you’d want to be happy or be content, but I see it as the car you own. “Happy” is driving a high-powered Lamborghini with one, free tank of gas and one free month of insurance and maintenance. “Contentment” is driving an NHTSA (Look it up) 5-Star rated car which runs on human farts. I mean, very little gas.

Happy is hard to control. It’s like fireworks: it comes and goes as it pleases, with lengthy pauses to reinforce its spectacular return.

Contentment is the slow smoking of brisket, and the knowledge your hard work will pay off in the end.

Contentment seems easy to find: a good sunrise, actual help from someone in Customer Service, or having your Klondike bar melt perfectly without making a mess. Or having trees talk to you. It’s all around if we find the time and the way to see it.

The study noted above was also looking into whether or not people knew they were content. Or happy. Or if they even knew the difference. Ever have a very good day and wonder why no one else was? You just had a case of the Contentments. The saddest thing, ever, then would be you surrounded by contentment and not know it as you strive mightily for happiness.

Remember Yang Bais words about accepting the good and bad of our lives. Accept the contentment life offers, while waiting for the happiness you seek.

Now, I’m off to the Citadel of Contentment: The Chair. Hope you have one of those.

Why Now?

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Mysticism: a belief or experience involving a direct connection with the divine or ultimate reality, and can also refer to an altered state of consciousness.

No one really understands the brain. We’re close, but not close enough to mapping the 86 billion neurons making up an average brain. Add to the complexity, each neuron can have hundreds of thousands of synapses, or connections to other neurons. 86 billion times 100,000 equals…

So when someone says they have a mystical experience, what does it mean? Is it in fact a connection with the “ultimate reality” (safe way to include all deities), or is it a misfire, a malfunction of something in the synapses and neurons?

As a young man, I experienced episodes of “dazed happenings” lasting from 30-60 seconds. They were times when my mind went wandering and I let go, resulting in feelings of connection and “great peace” with the world. They faded with maturation but were never forgotten. I labeled them “Grace Periods.”

With the onset of The Calamities in 2023, and after months of drug treatments and radiation, the Grace Periods tried to make a comeback. Maybe. In the months following treatment, the “mind wandering” would start, but the first few times it continued down a darker path and felt like approaching death, so I fought the wandering and found my way back to “normal”. Subsequent UNC research revealed a name and possible cause: Orthostatic Imbalance from too much potassium. Limiting potassium and quick, body position changes ended the “Dark” wanderings

But as you can probably tell by my last post, the wandering has returned. And if the wandering is unchecked, the result is trees talk to me and there is beauty everywhere. God’s beauty, or the “Ultimate Reality’s” beauty. Its a funny thing (strange funny) to feel. “Things” disappear. Things like worry, anxiety, pain, the unfathomable, bottomless questions about “being”. All gone. Nothing but contentment. Not happiness, just a feeling everything will not just be okay, but it will be what it is meant to be. The wandering is still not understood. But, all is well.

As a senior citizen, my first understanding of why these things happen is the close relationship to death. Or closer, relationship of age. A few months back I wrote about a midnight revelation (See: “Whoa…really?” from May 10, 2024.) which may be related to the Grace Periods.

A rational, scientific mind could interpret what I’ve described as the misfiring of complicated bionic equipment and connections in an aging brain.

A mystical person, however, would revel in the evidence of a Grand Design from the Ultimate Reality, who has something fantastic in mind for one of His/Her/Its creations.

Maybe someday we’ll know but right now, both explanations sound right to me. Contentment is a wonderful thing, even if it’s not understood.

Nature? Nurture? Let’s call the whole thing off…

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A farm up bringing in the 1950s and 60s set the foundation for a certain life: frugal, efficient, and ornamentally-deprived

Add to the mix a pubescent mind reading the complete works of JD Salinger, and a love of 1950’s folk music and what do you get?

A young human being who has a serious issue with modern materialism/consumerism.

I was sun bathing on a picnic table behind a building in my home city this morning, and the huge tree next to me said: “Talk to me.” Are plants sentient? The tree was 80 feet tall, or more, and had a canopy designed so perfectly, the blue sky was brilliantly painted in the spaces between the thick, green leaves. And the sun came in to the picnic table at an angle, so as to tan, but still allow my gaze free access to the sky.

It was perfect. It was heaven. And it was free. No charge. No deposit. No waste. No plastic packaging.

I answered the tree. I asked if it was lonely, even though its majestic canopy seemed to be holding hands with the neighboring trees. It didn’t answer but had anyone else in history talked to this tree? It had to be very old. Was it senile? I touched its bark but still no more words. Maybe trees aren’t sentient, after all.

But are humans? My recent move from the south to the north highlighted how fast–and insidious–consumerism is: a lot of “things” left my life through donation, garage sale, gifting, or (sadly) garbage. All that came north was what I needed. It fit in my small car. Where had all those departed things come from? And why did a “human being who has a serious issue with modern materialism/consumerism” have all this excess stuff?

The idyllic morning in my tree support group sent me back to college days, when as Freshman we were challenged to “challenge everything”, every modern assumption, every modern truth, every modern “ism”.

There is no hope for the world if a man who hates consumerism ends up a absent minded consumer, is there? Was it my nature that overcame my nurture? Or was it something else?

Back at my apartment, I looked for my worn copy of Vance Packards 1957 book: “The Hidden Persuaders”, a book about how advertisers can manipulate consumers, but it was gone. I’ll just have to buy another.