Don't worry, be happy
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 13/Jul/2011 01:27, 34 days ago
I’m happy to say that I am around today although slightly tired on Monday from editing the blog very late on Sunday night.There’s no sign at all of the grumpy Blog yet so I can slip in some controversial thinking.But first a late-breaking development on the happiness front. Bunty has steered me again in the right direction - you don't read or write happiness, you do it. This was the missing link for me. I had notes on a practical guide to happiness without realizing why the practical side was so important. Here are two yachts doing happiness at the Royal Hamilton Yacht Club where Bunty was on Wednesday:Now I'll return to my previous notes that should lead back towards Bunty's revelation.We can explore together various approaches to happiness. At least one will work for you. Also more importantly, we will see practical tools to make other people happy. As I mentioned on Sunday, Jamaica has rather a lot of murders each year. Possibly that number would be lower if there were more people here who are happier.So let's start on our journey towards happiness. The United States Declaration of Independence provides clues. Happiness is not a "slam-dunk", in other words, not a sure thing.USA citizens may have certain unalienable rights such as life and liberty however there are no guarantees on happiness. They only have the inalienable right to pursue it. We will do better.We will achieve happiness.Unfortunately there is a problem with happiness. Not everyone can be happy even if trying very, very hard.The Harvard academics did not to tell you everything about its Happiness course. It's this. You cannot enroll unless you have a minor in calculus– not just high school calculus, not even college level calculus, but three challenging Ivy League university maths department calculus courses.Sorry.That’s the only way to understand happiness properly.You cannot have happiness without pain.I emerged unscathed from that last paragraph.Undoubtedly Blog is still sound asleep or has his mind elsewhere.Here is some calculus in case you have escaped it in your life so far. If you truly want to continue your quest for happiness, you will have to learn calculus, whatever the odds are against you:Do not feel smug if you think you can handle this little fellow. You should be aware that if you can beat this little guy, that he has many older and larger siblings that will come to his rescue, gang up on you, and make you feel sorry.But good news readers. You may relax. I was only kidding about the calculus courses. Some more good news is that as a numbers person I don't relate that well to words, so what I write will be to the point and brief. I also do not handle numbers all that well, so not many of them either. That's enough confessions for one paragraph. No words, no numbers, no literacy?For happiness, as with anything else, we should simultaneously think about both the big and the small picture. Galileo expressed this well when he said that the sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. It should make you happy to know that. In the big scheme of things we are all small, like grapes, so good things can come our way to make us happy.http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/galileogal106899.htmlHappiness can be real in total although unreal in its parts, although that's no problem. Neils Bohr, who provided fundamental thinking on the atomic structure and quantum mechanics, tells us that everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. But do not worry about that. You can let happiness be real for you and enjoy it without over-analyzing it.http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/niels_bohr.htmlFor a paragraph, we can try an alternative non-scientific approach to find happiness. Sit in a comfortable chair or lie down. Close your eyes. Let your arms and legs go limp. Relax and say to yourself "Wow, am I am ever so lucky". This should cause a warm glow of happiness to engulf you and you will feel good because you are happy.More of us should consider ourselves lucky. Lou Gehrig, the famous New York Yankees baseball player, should inspire us. He had an incurable fatal disease while he was still playing baseball. At his retirement celebration that filled the 60,000 seat Yankee Stadium he still said that he was the luckiest man on the face of this earth. We are all luckier than him, so be happy.Being happy does not necessarily mean that you have to suspend disbelief and look at the world through Pollyanna glasses. I was not convinced by“authentic happiness” inhttp://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx. To me, the "authentic" in the "authentic happiness" added no more meaning to happiness than adding the adjective "wet" to "water".Happiness has been extensively studied scientifically in the monumental Harvard study directed by George Vaillant. It is currently in its 70th year. It's technique was to document the major life milestones of its 200+ subjects and correlate them to a series of surveys conducted over time.Essentially the surveys asked the subjects whether if they could live their lives all over again, to whom would they turn for advice on doing things differently. The really happy people of course would respond that they would not need to do so. Over time as the subjects passed through their major life milestones, the study accumulated information that could be matched up with their happiness answers.This old English milestone came from Brian Murless. It was in Ilchester.Here's a hypothetical example on the study's methodogy . Instead of survey question asking if their pets made them happy, the study would count up the number of happy subjects and then compare that to how many had pets to see if there was a correlation - whether pets contributed to happiness, or notIf absolutely everybody who had a pet was happy, then you could likely say that you needed a pet to be happy. This would be doubly confirmed if the non-pet owners were all uniformly unhappy.The hypotheseis about pets might not be true if you had a pet as shown in the picture below who hung around all day, smoked, drank liquor and lost money at cards.800x600Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-CAX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/7439/The study concluded that there are seven factors for a happy life. They areNormal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}mature adaptations, education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight.Mature adaptions are the fourth and final stage in the key adaptions process. Essentially you can look at adaptions like your way to play better at cards. Sometimes you are dealt a bad hand - . you were given cards you didn't want if you needed to win. However,depending on your technique, which is basically your adaptions process that evolves over time, you could minimize your problems, and possibly even reach a happy outcome.Interestingly, I had inadvertently zeroed right in on the key adaptability factor when I hypothesized the skiing on the Jamaican Blue Mountain example in the first happiness blog.To encourage you to read the full article referred to in the link above, there were some quite unexpected findings. For example, physical exercise at college paid back in mental health, not physical health, at a later age. Mental concerns at an earlier age had a dramatic effect on physical health in later life. This occurred because depressed people would be less likely to take care of themselves, get help or advice from friends and family, or go to see a doctor.A score of four out of the seven factors is the pass mark and gives you good odds on a well-lived, presumably happy, life that will see you become an octogenarian. How many of the dogs above would reach the canine equivalent of 80 years? Maybe one might squeak through if he or she went to obedience school?I learn every day. Did you know for example that there is no such thing as happiness in psychology? It's elaborately named "subjective well-being".And the overall number one piece of advice from the study's director:Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}“That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” Not only is it a good-feeling correct answer, but also a conclusion backed up by 70 years of exhaustive study. Remember this, and be on your way to happiness.Here is some more input on happiness from a different source - not a scientist, but the French romance novel author Aurore Dupin, later baronne Dudevant, more commonly known as George Sand.800x600Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-CAX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1464.George_Sand"One is happy as a result of one'sown efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience."Hers was another view on happiness, and there very many. It indirectly said that you have to "do" happiness and not passively wait for it to find you.Before cutting back on research, I succumbed to temptation and looked at an Internet page stating that the Danes were the happiest people in the world. The Danes were quite inventive in achieving happiness, although I don't recommend following their three step technique unless you are also Danish.Step 1 - Be the world's worst pessimist.Step 2 - Review what happened later to see that it wasn't anywhere as bad as you feared.Step 3 - Be so relieved you become the world's happiest person.Other happy country news was that two Caribbean countries with the letter "a" in their names were in the top 20 happy countries. I won't say who they were so that by mistake you become unhappy if you don't live in one of them.Logically it should have no effect on your own happiness level because happiness is an individual quality. However negatively, I for one could find it extremely annoying, irritating, etc if the whole country except for me was deliriously happy. I would be quite unhappy. My only satisfaction would be knowing that at least I brought down the unbearably happy country's average happiness ratio. But don't be unhappy, read on.But I was wrong, You can't fight happiness. Realistically if I lived in a very happy country then many of the Harvard study's seven factors would work against me. Ouch!1) My wife would likely be happy and that would rub off on me in a stable relationship,2) There would be few bars and pubs because everyone was already happy and didn't need booze, so I couldn't abuse alcohol all that easily,3) I would have no need to smoke to relax, and so on.I would be well on the way to the score of 4 to get a pass mark. So realistically, I would likely be happy too. You can't escape happiness.Another thought, my latest blog title reminded me about a very happy song. So go out and buy the Cocktails movie soundtrack and listen to "Bobby" McFerrin's song "Don't Worry be happy" a few times in a row. You are guaranteed to become happy.Here's a final thought. I had difficulty writing this blog when I was not in a happy mood - it was like the happiness reached outwards from the words and into real life. Happiness has more power than you expect. Don't fight it - you can't win.I trust I have given you practical tools to help you move towards happiness. Go out and do happiness. Perhaps the singer Cat Steven's words will remind you that "you're only dancing on this earth for a short while". There's no point being unhappy.800x600Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-CAX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Oh-Very-Young-lyrics-Cat-Stevens/BE96C316CEC02DAD482569BA000E09E5Readers may be interested in Blog and me. After all our conflicts, I apologize for not including any images before to help you visualize us better.Here's a Blog look-alike on the left .A George image on the right.No severe reactions from Blog today, so maybe my thoughts were not that far off the mark.To close this off. In a way the internet is like Isaac Newton's vast ocean of knowledge. I have picked up an occasional smoother pebble here or a prettier looking shell there. This was purely to suit my own purposes. Land lubbers may say that they couldn't see the forest for the trees, but I perfectly exemplify the nautical types who can't see the ocean for the shells and pebbles.Don't be afraid to be happy.