AS I WAS SAYING......
"Are you happy?" When asked that question I immediately scan the interrogator for bulging eyeballs, gormless grinning, and telltale twitches! What is happiness? Our footballers are travelling to Japan/Korea. This will lift the spirit of the nation, we are promised. So happy will we be, in fact, that, should a general election immediately precede this event, we will surely reelect the present government. So, who is happy? What makes us happy? There lies the problem. Because one man's heaven will be another man's hell. Happiness is a subjective condition. Hence the original question (and questioner too!) must be mad. But is it, or he? Not so, say the scientists. You can measure scientifically the happiness of an individual, and a nation too! Apparently scientists from a wide range of disciplines have been involved in this task for years: geneticists, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists have all contributed. How do these people measure happiness? Well, one method employed is obvious enough: you simply ask them! "Are you happy, sir?" So a scientist, not a madman, probably asked the question that began this little outpouring. (Spot the difference!)
But this poses its own problems: not only nations, but individuals too, rewrite history rather quickly. A miserable day that ends on a happy note will be fondly remembered as happy, whereas in fact it was anything but! ('The Summers of our childhood were all sunny'). A more objective method is called for. Scientists add 'experience sampling'. People are equipped with pagers and are beeped at random times to monitor their fluctuating feelings. Others measure the amount of adrenal hormone cortisol in the salvia. This indicates stress levels. Fake smiles are exposed through electrical recordings from the facial muscles, and so on. Data is harvested and stored.
An institution called The World Values Survey has been harvesting such data since 1981. They have come up with some interesting findings. For example, while an increase in wealth makes a big difference to the happiness level of poorer nations, it has little impact on the wealthy. So money does not necessarily buy more happiness. Apparently, Americans and Moldovians are the unhappiest of all. Economically poles apart, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder in misery! Money doesn't matter.
People are remarkably adaptable to both good and bad circumstances. Lottery winners are happier than average, but only for a year after their big win. The same goes for marriage! On the reverse side, misfortune does not necessarily spell an end to happiness. Even people with disabling injuries regain their sense of well being with time.
So, what is important then? I will leave the final word to Edward Diener, co-coordinator of the study: "Individual happiness is not strongly linked to wealth, age, sex, race or education. Neither is it significantly correlated with income. But it does emerge clearly that such post-materialistic values as community, belonging and self-expression are central ingredients of happiness." I have examined photographs of this Diener fellow closely. I found no signs of bulging eyeballs, gormless grins or telltale twitches! He may well be on to something important.
-D.L.
LEST WE FORGET....
Historians face an impossible task, since their primary source is human memory. For these memories are changing all the time. There is, in all normal times, the slow fading that we call forgetting. But there are also the sudden changes that come with a dramatic change of external circumstances, with some new discovery, or with the emergence of a new political order. Then the selective process goes into over-drive, comforting clouds obscure the unpleasant, cerebral censorship tears up and rearranges.
For the historian the mystery lies not just in the weakness of human memory, but in its very fecundity, its infinite creativity, its elemental compulsion endlessly to rearrange the past in constantly shifting patterns. Usually, the 'new' patterns are more comforting to our self-esteem, pride and vanity.
But not always. Sometimes memory tortures people with remorse or guilt more than circumstances really justify. The awful irony is that most often it is the victims who are cursed by memory, while the perpetrators are blessed by forgetting.
Memory, this champion trickster, is thus the real adversary for anyone who tries to establish what really happened. Martha Gellhorn has written very movingly about this, in relation to her own memories of war, concluding, 'What is the use in having lived so long, travelled so widely, listened and looked so hard, if at the end you don't know what you know?'
-Timothy Garton Ash in 'History of the Present', (1999)
PRAYER
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
Utters itself. So, a woman will lift
Her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
At the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
Enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
Then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
In the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
Console the lodger looking out across
a Midland town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they name their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
-Carol-Ann Duffy.PURPOSE
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain
Or help one fainting robin into its nest again
I shall not live in vain.
-Emily DickinsonREFLECTIONS
While being aware of many of the pearls of wisdom to be found in theatre and on the bookshelf, I have been most profoundly affected by two sentences, which were said in my presence by relatively faceless people, and one which I read on a poster in a small country restaurant. I suppose, like many things in life, it is all a matter of timing.
"You are not responsible for a person's actions. You are only responsible for your own reactions." This came at a time early in my career when I was finding the stance and rudeness of some of the people I encountered to be quite unacceptable. I found it equally upsetting to be in the presence of anyone treating a third party with anything but dignity and respect. Applying my newfound maxim to specifics immediately turned my whole attitude around. By controlling my own reactions I found myself in a position where I was not only less offended on such occasions, but in a better position to counter from a more objective and calmer perspective.
"There are no bad people; at least as long as you don't think about them." There was a slight pause between these two phrases, enough for me to conjure up a hit list of names ranging from colleagues, through national and international politicians I felt the world could do without. Then I focused on the second part. I have always found it disturbing to see the number of people who spend their time in the canteen at work, or on the phone to their friends, complaining about their bosses, their work colleagues, or acquaintances. All this negativity is on their own valuable time that they will never get back. One cannot deny that less than desirable people are out there and many of them do indeed manage to get into positions of authority. The trick is to keep them out of your personal space. I suppose I frequently heard the expression 'out of sight, out of mind' but this particular way of expressing it made me focus more sharply. In a way it reminded me of the over simplification of Toscanini's answer to question, "What is the art of conducting?" "Finding the tune!"
During my lunch I noticed a picture on the far wall of the restaurant. It was a tranquil painting of a coastline complete with the traditional sea gulls, sweeping bay, and setting sun on the water. When I went to leave I passed close enough to read the sentence at the bottom "You never reach new horizons unless you have the courage to leave shore!" In my own profession this can be taken literally. Its dynamic is far more dramatic, however, when applied to the mind. The process of not just accepting information and interpretations passed on to me by adults during my formative years opened up leading the way to whole fresh freedom of thought and the strength to question, discard, form and act upon my own views and beliefs. Not always easy, but essential.
I shouldn't be surprised that I was influenced by these encounters because they are very much in line with my belief in the power positive thinking. The creative artist who makes his audience smile is the one I most admire!
Proinnsías Ó Duinn, (In 'Sources', Edited by Marie Heaney)