Happiness

iPhone offers an app to track your happiness? Seriously? That is wrong in so many ways.

First off, one good way to destroy happiness is to try to measure it. “Hmm, I’m five percent less happy than yesterday. Wonder what went wrong? Ah, I’ll bet it’s because . . . Yep, that really makes me mad. Wait, down another ten points!” C’mon, who really thinks that’s going to work?

And even if that didn’t get you down, how about the simple act of having to log the data? That’s why fantasy sports geeks are the most miserable fans on the planet – they took a fun pastime and turned it into record-keeping, stat-tracking drudgery. So to make sure we’re happier let’s add a requirement for periodic data capture to our day? Doesn’t look like a glide path to success to me.

The problem here is everyone wants to be happy but we’re so screwed up we don’t even know what it really is, much less how to get there. We equate happiness with comfort and pleasure. Ain’t gonna work, because pleasure ends when the stimulus stops, which means for every moment of pleasure-induced happiness there is a corresponding moment of sadness when the pleasure is over. And guess which comes last?

And too much comfort gets uncomfortable. Don’t believe me? Go kick back in your recliner and put your feet up. Comfortable? Good, now stay there for eight hours and tell me how you feel.

I’m no genius but I’m as good as anyone at being unhappy, so I have a lot of experience treating the condition. There’s only one thing that really works.

First, a caveat: this side of heaven you won’t be happy all the time. Some things, like a bad CAT scan, should make you unhappy. If they don’t, that’s not happiness, that’s good meds.

So what we’re talking about here is why so often we’re unhappy with no particular reason, and I know what causes that.

That happens when you know, deep in your heart of hearts, that you aren’t worth the air you’re breathing. The equation is pretty simple – every day I’m alive I consume x amount of resources, whether that’s the water I use in the shower or the time it takes my wife to fix me a meal. We’re all sharing this planet, and I’m using stuff up, so it’s only right that I give something back. When I don’t, I can’t feel good about myself – I’m just another blood-sucking parasite. A lot of job-related unhappiness comes from knowing that some days we don’t earn our pay.

Flip it around, give value commensurate to what you cost, and you can be happy, because you can feel good about it. People like you, and you like yourself, when you’re a contributor. That’s why unearned leisure isn’t any fun. It’s also why a cold beer tastes best after a hard day’s work.

All of that is true no matter what your world view is. If you’re one who chooses to recognize the truth, then you know that these things are true because God wired us to be like Him, which is to say our purpose is all wrapped up with doing good and serving other people. Bottom line – the only way really to be happy is to be doing what we were made to do. The iPhone needs an app for that.

Plaid shorts

I envy guys who can wear plaid shorts.
So far, I haven’t been able to make myself do it. It’s just not me. Sigh . . .
When I see a guy wearing plaid shorts in public, with no hint of self-consciousness, I have to admit that, barring any unfortunate clash of colors/patterns or the presence of long dark socks, it looks pretty good. In fact, that’s a look that says, “I’m with it, I’m confident in who I am, and I like to have fun more than I like to be cool even though I‘m still way cooler than you.”
I like that. I want to be like that. I don’t really want to wear plaid shorts, because I don’t like them, but I want to look like that.
My problem is, I already have a well-established look. It consists of khakis on workdays, cargo shorts or jeans on the weekends, all of which I wear like I wish I was still wearing a uniform. The most charitable thing you can say about this look is, old school. In truth, it screams, “Retired army officer whose idea of fun probably involves discomfort for others, who would rather shoot someone than dance in public.”
And there-in lies the difference: Stupid is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The very fact of being worried about looking stupid makes you look stupid. If you could care less how you look, you just look fun. And I invariably look stupid when I do anything but walk. I can’t just act as the spirit moves, go with the flow, move with the groove. I have to calculate, consider effects, mull over possible outcomes. And when you do that, that fleeing moment where you can look smooth and natural passes while you’re still stuck on, “Hey, maybe if I . . .”
Somehow, plaid shorts have come to epitomize in my mind this basic inability I have to be naturally fun. For one thing, my knee jerk reaction when I see them on a manikin is, “Never in a hundred thousand years.” Give me earth tones or denim. But then, if I ever work up the courage to point out a pair to Dawn, she wrinkles up her nose and says, “Never in a hundred thousand years.”
It’s not that she hates plaid. She just instantly processes all the factors and reaches the fashion-attuned and socially-aware conclusion that anyone who knows me, upon seeing me in plaid shorts, would immediately assume I was having a mid-life crisis with possible alternative-lifestyle overtones. Which would be not so good.
So I’m stuck wondering if there’s a way to project that fun attitude while wearing khakis. And I realize that, yeah, the guy in the plaid shorts could, but I can’t. Because it’s not the shorts’ fault that I look like the third-least fun guy on the planet, after G. Gordon Liddy and Dick Cheney.
To fix that, I’d have to go back to the first day of kindergarten, when I was scared and shy and lay under a table sucking my thumb because Jack and the Bean Stalk was too intense. That start to my social career pretty much defenestrated any chance of being cool or fun.
I guess I’ll just have to live with the fact that even though strangers will think I’m gruff and unbending, those who know me understand that I’m really just a grouch who on his best day on earth didn’t have as much fun as that guy in the plaid shorts has just walking to the coffee shop. Not that I’m bitter.
So, new resolution: I’m going to be fun if I die in the attempt. I will try so hard I might sprain something. I will work at it until people who see me think “fun” even if I have to choke it out of them.
Or, maybe, I could just relax, be who God made me to be, and have fun watching the cool people have fun, and maybe join in a little if invited. Since all the people I love are cool, that should work out OK.
I think doing it that way may not make me fun, but it could give me joy, at least as I think God means the word. That would be the ultimate cool. Yeah, think I’ll try that.

Voices in my head

Sometimes I hear voices, insistent ones. They’re not evil, at least I don’t think they are, because they remind me of the gang I used to run with in middle school. We weren’t evil, although a number of female classmates probably thought so, but you could fairly say that the whole equaled something significantly less than the sum of the parts. That’s what the voices are like. Let me show you.

• Voice: “Eat it.” I really hate this guy. I can’t resist him because in 47 years of gastronomic experimentation I have only met two foods I didn’t like, and I’m reconsidering those. I even liked MREs. At home where the options on the table are limited, as are the quantities, this is less of a problem, but at the Chinese buffet? I know I’ll hate myself later.
• Voice: “There’s a girl! Speed up.” This is really stupid, because it’s just a twitch left over from high school – they don’t notice me and I don’t care. The element of surprise and my knee-jerk reaction make me completely susceptible, though, which means when college is in session that halfway through my run my wheezing steams up passing car windows and I have to hold my head sideways to keep from stepping on my tongue. Dawn laughs.
• Voice: “Tiger could do it.” I hear this guy only when I’m in the rough trying to stick the green between a near bunker and a far water hazard, which I can barely see through a small gap in the trees. Which means about once a hole. Immediately after my ball ricochets between several trees and comes to rest 15 feet behind me, I hear the voice saying “Hahahahahahaha!!!!”
• Voice: “Just for a second.” After lunch, warm quiet office, full belly, spreadsheet on the monitor, eyes drooping. Not good, not good at all. This dude is trying to get me fired. Fortunately I have my boss convinced that’s what I do when I’m thinking.
• Voice: “Just look. You don’t have to buy anything.” This one must live next to Best Buy, because I never hear him anywhere else. If I thought for just a minute I’d catch the lie; in that store, you do too have to buy something.
• Voice: “Dawn won’t catch on.” What, she can’t tell I goofed off while she was gone by the laundry wrinkling in the dryer and the dishes in the sink? This guy thinks I’m stupid. He’s right.
• Voice: “Just pick it up, you wimp. It’s not that big.” The fact that I ever listen is proof of near-term memory loss, because after ten years of quarterly chiropractor visits you’d think I would know that my back isn’t what it used to be. Funny thing is, I tend to do this more often when Dawn is there to help than when she isn’t. In a less mature individual that might be ego, but in this case I just can’t figure it out.

These are all male voices, as you can probably tell by what they’re saying. All guys, and their voices are all very, very similar to mine. Hmmm . . .
There is one voice that’s different though, maybe the only true friend of the bunch. This one has never gotten me in trouble, not even once. This is the one that says things like, “Just because you’re mad doesn’t mean he’s stupid,” and “Be faithful today to the man you want to be tomorrow,” and “Schedule doesn’t matter as much as people.” And “God loves you anyway, so get up, dust off and try again.”
This voice is female; she goes by the Greek name Sophia, Wisdom in English, and you can read all about her in the first part of Proverbs. She doesn’t shout, but if you listen you can hear her just fine, and she uses simple words even a dummy like me can understand. She has never steered me wrong, not once in the decades I’ve known her, which would make you think I’d listen more often. Ah well, get up, dust off . . .

Reflections on a wet car seat

Walked into my office with a soggy butt, thinking long thoughts about contentment.

The clammy caboose came from leaving the pick-up window rolled down overnight in the rain. Don’t do that very often, so it came as a surprise – of course, my first impulse was to blame somebody else, but I couldn’t pull that off in any supportable way.

The thoughts on contentment sprang from my amazement that having a damp derriere did not immediately ruin my day, not even when the overly-aggressive office air conditioning hit it. Why, I wondered, am I in such a good mood when nothing good has happened to me yet? (I guess the question itself shows that behind the grumpy mask I sometimes wear there does indeed reside a grump.)

Next step in the chain of logic was to think that some people don’t need good things to happen to be happy. Most children, for example, are happy unless something happens to make them unhappy. A few lucky adults are also like that, but I don’t think I’m unusual because I’m wired the opposite way. I tend to cruise along in emotional Neutral until an external force shifts me into another gear. In fact, it’s probably true that what I often think of as happiness is simply the absence of any degree of sadness.

That said, my soaked seat could have shifted me into Grouchy, especially given the constructive commentary that came with it. Why didn’t it? A little introspection made me aware of a warm fuzzy feeling that I tentatively identified as contentment. Being the man I am, I immediately tried to banish it.

For one thing, as a highly trained (former) member of the greatest fighting force on earth, I have not normally held warm and fuzzy in high esteem. In a testosterone-driven community like the Army you may as well paint a bull’s-eye on your back.

And then there’s my knee-jerk avoidance of vulnerability. This is that stupid thing from the lizard part of my brain that thinks high expectations are the single best way to be disappointed. Better to anticipate badness, because then reality will probably look OK.

To cap it off, I was trained by Uncle Sam to plan for the thing that’s most likely to happen and also for the worst thing that could happen. “Most likely” doesn’t often mean “really good” and “worst” never does, so you can see what frame of mind that approach can leave me in.

But today, despite my best efforts, I feel undeniably content. Don’t want anything, what I already have is good. Small house? Easier to clean, and big enough for two. Small TV? Don’t watch it much anyway. Small pick-up? More garage space. Small paycheck? It’s enough, and it’s really not that small either. Today I like my job, like this town, like the people in it, like the world. I even like myself. What gives? Wait, just thought of something. Be right back.

Nope, that little two-minute first-response drug test says I’m clean. No extra seeds on the poppy-seed muffins. So . . .

Maybe it has to do with the realization, refreshed by recent events, that God wrote the end of my story before I started on the beginning. So I already know how this winds up: I win. Or more accurately, we win, all of us who are riding the omnipotent shoulders of the God who took on the Ultimate Badness a long time ago and won. In that context all the sturm und drang of this world is just . . . stuff. Maybe that’s what I’m feeling today.

Either way, I’m just going to go with it. Sure, maybe one of the darker bits of life really is going to jump out and whack me upside the head. So what? Might fix the crick in my neck.

Wise Dutch man

Okay, the Sotomayor hearings have me worried. Something has to be done or this woman will soon be activating from the highest court in the land. So I want to demonstrate the underlying falseness of her “word play” by showing how wise a Dutch man can be. I know, those three words have heretofore only been used as a reference to Abraham Kuyper, but this is an act of desperation. So, a few bits of wisdom from one of the last demographic groups it’s still OK to discriminate against.

• Don’t eat the olliebollen.
• The best place to find a good Dutch wife and raise lots of little blonde-haired rug-crawlers is Dordt College. That’s why a lot of us don’t go there (although I did). I mean, let’s face it, there’s a reason they refer to Dutch women as “sturdy.” My wife would be the exception of course – no one would ever call her sturdy. Not that she’s weak or anything so she could be considered sturdy in the sense of structural strength, and she’s not one of those skinny tall girls with legs that . . . OK, dropping shovel now.
• There’s a reason you don’t see Dutch restaurants. Dutch cuisine tends to run long on fat and sugar, preferably both at once – I think they thought the top of the old food pyramid was the good part. Eating Dutch food is how most of us got to be sturdier than our wives. Truth in advertising would require a Dutch restaurant chain to be called Cholesterol R Us.
• All the dumb Dutchmen jokes are simply an insidious plot to neutralize us as one of the greatest forces for good the world has ever seen. We are a proud race with a long history of martial prowess . . . um, no, maybe scientific accomplishment . . . well, OK, how about athletic domination? Rats. Hey, we are good at tulips and really bizarre footwear. And one on one we could probably take the average Frenchman. At least we don’t put peppers in our ice cream.
• You can whine, complain, sniffle, wheeze and pretend to be at death’s door, but if you have a Dutch wife you’re going to church anyway. So hang onto the few shreds of dignity you have left and don’t even try.
• We Dutch men have big thighs because it’s our genetic heritage – we’re the product of generations of ice skaters and bicyclists. Don’t know where the belly comes from but I’m sure that’s not my fault either.
• Cleanliness isn’t actually next to godliness, but it is the best way to get your mother to leave you alone.
• Politics is easy. It doesn’t matter if your guy has his hand in the till or routinely charters the good ship Monkey Business (props for the gratuitous Gary Hart reference, huh? Remember him?), if he’s for school vouchers and against abortion it’s OK to vote for him.

There, see? I may not be Supreme Court material, but it’s obvious my insight is at last as good as the sturdy – oops, meant wise – Latina woman under consideration.

I wish . . .

An amazing woman from our church is in the hospital, dying by inches from a cerebral aneurysm. It was a lightning stroke out of blue skies, and her husband and children have wrestled for the last week with what it all means, and what may be to come. It’s incredibly sad, and thought-provoking. It doesn’t make me ask why – the Lord is lord of this too – but it prompts a lot of other things.
It makes me wish I’d told my daughter more often what a beautiful person she is, and my son how proud he makes me. And it makes me grateful they both found and married good people who are good for them.
It makes me want to be a better life partner for my wife, who puts up with an awful lot from me.
It makes me wish I saw more of my siblings, including my in-laws. Great people, all of them, and I’m always better for the time I spend with them.
It makes me wonder if I’m doing justice to my parents, who have a right to expect more attention from a son who lives less than a mile away.
It makes me hope that, just as I did with my son, I’ll be able to teach my grandson to climb trees, paddle a canoe, build a fire, skinny-dip, grill a steak, love God.
It makes me want to listen more, and talk less.
It makes me wonder what my legacy will be. From what I can see, the list of lives touched, people served, and values transferred is pretty short, especially compared to the woman who prompted this line of thinking.
It makes me wish I knew more about art and literature and music and current events and scripture. It makes me wish I knew less about bars, the occult, off-color humor, violence and how to get away with goofing off at work.
When I was in college I made a list of things I wanted to do in my lifetime. I never checked off most of the mountains I wanted to climb, trails I wanted to hike, wonders I wanted to see, wealth I wanted to accumulate, and fame I wanted to achieve. But it really doesn’t matter. That’s a young man’s list, written when I didn’t have much context. It’s self-centered and reflects an immature understanding of what makes a good life.
Instead, what I have is 40+ years of mostly successful relationships, no debt and enough money to help other people, a small handful of things I’m better at than most, and somewhere between an hour and 50 years to do something with it all. That’s good enough for me, and more than I deserve.

Musings

Hard to put a long, coherent thought stream together during the summer, especially just after returning from vacation, so a few random musings instead.

--Now that we all collectively own a piece of GM, can I tell them to stop making pick-ups that are as tall as UPS trucks? I’d like to be able to see my exit sign more than five seconds before I have to make the lane change.
-- The dance of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings has begun. A lot of shrill voices on both sides, facts presented out of context, mind-numbing or mindless media coverage, yet another chance to hear Al Sharpton’s strident voice on race, and a nominee who proves once again that no person is fully qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice. And yet, I can’t look away.
-- I’m embarrassed at the behavior of “my people.” Christians who shoot doctors, blame hardship on the sins of the sufferers, think HIV is God’s judgment on the victim, and equate the American flag with the cross. I think people don’t like Christians because we take no prisoners and shoot our wounded. You’re either with us, or you’re going down, buddy. Hey, I know! How bout if they would know us by our love?
-- Why do I have to choose between the party of Joe Biden, Barbara Boxer, welfare, unions and big government or the party of Dick Cheney, Pat Buchanan, big oil, water-boarding and environmental irresponsibility? I want a party of Colin Powell, Dan Cathy, good earth-keeping, a little consideration for the businessmen and women who drive our economy, and celebrities who are seen but not heard.
-- News flash: Ideas may be the new currency, but an information economy is not going to work. Somebody still has to make steel beams, frozen pizzas and desk chairs, or all the smart people will die of exposure, starvation or bad posture. Hooray for American manufacturing!
-- The Twins are just teasing us this year. Again. Rats.
-- But the NFL starts training camps this month, so who cares?
-- Space shuttle launches make me want to stand up and salute. Go Endeavor! And it’s pretty cool that while we fight each other down here on earth, we cooperate pretty well on the space station.