Afraid of Happiness? You're not alone.
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 11/Jul/2011 18:38, 34 days ago
"Afraid of happiness? You're not alone". caught my attention in the Globe and Mail this morning. I see the Blog, defender of the blog's integrity, stirring restively in the corner, I better be careful about what I write. I know this is leading into a definition of happiness because if you don't know what happiness is, then how can you be afraid of it.I should stop reading the newspapers as I keep getting side-tracked by non-Jamaican topics. However possibly there could be a Jamaican angle here. The Jamaican murder rate is high and we cannot blame happy people for all of them.This is a more relevant thought than my original one that you would not be happy if you come to Jamaica for winter sports. For example, don't waste your time going to the 7000 feet high Blue Mountain peak even in December and waiting for snow to ski on. It's not going to happen. Adapt and move on.Or, if you cannot adapt all on your own then maybe Jamaicans might need a university course on how to be happy. This is what they do at Harvard University in the USA, Most Jamaicans would read this news in complete disbelief. As I slowly get immersed in the Jamaican culture I start to wonder a lot too.Who knew you had to take classes to be happy, and at an expensive ivy league university as well. I had heard the expression that school days are the happiest days of your life. But a course from a heavy hitting major university might make this unusual claim seem more close to the truth than I expected it would be.Let's see what the paper reported in Sarah Hampson's article in this Monday's Globe and Mail"Mr. Achor, who helped teach and design the famed happiness course at Harvard, acknowledges that many people feel they don’t deserve to be happy when there’s so much suffering in the world. But shrewdly, he changes the logic. It’s not that you have to serve the poor to be happy. It’s that you have to allow yourself to be happy first, because that’s how you can be of most help.“You’re not making their (the poor people's) lives any better by being unhappy,” he explains in an interview. “In fact, you’re decreasing your ability to create a more positive world, which would help them as well. It actually dishonours other people’s suffering when we don’t celebrate the meaningful and happy parts of our lives, because that’s the part that gives us hope – that, in the midst of suffering, we can make a better world. But if the people experiencing a better world are not cognizant of it, then it eliminates hope.”Welcome to the revolution, she concluded.This makes sense, I guess, but taking a course and being happy are not necessarily the same thing. So I researched more. I am not 100% sure if the courses below and above are the same. The one below is "Positive Psychology" reported in the Boston Globe in March 2006 and had 855 students. I am not sure but the "how to be happy" information may have been a component of this course; not a complete course on its own.If you can achieve happiness without external aids, then you need read no further. But if you do need help, then it could be as worthwhile using scientific methods than not. If so far in your life you have not achieved happiness, then why not try a different approach?Surprisingly enough, famous scientists who have shaped the way we look at the world, made learned comments primarily about happiness rather than quantum theory, planetary rotation, evolution of the species and the concept of atoms to name a few subjects that have scared non-scientifically minded students.Who knew? Take this quote from Sir Isaac Newton that he might have made if he had visited the Time 'n' Place resort at Falmouth, Jamaica, but instead he had to settle for somewhere less scenic, and probably colder too if he was in Britain at the time."I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."A shadow appeared over the computer screen. Without looking around I knew it was Blog come to tell me something. Our communication is a two way street - it tells and I listen. "You would be thinking of winding this blog up now for the day? Surely, you can't define the whole gamut of human happiness in one evening's work? You know too how grumpy I will be tomorrow if I don't get a good night's sleep".I looked at my watch. It was time to go to bed.