Being happy without trying

As people place more importance on being happy, they become more unhappy and depressed. The pressure to be happy makes people less happy. Organizing your life around trying to become happier, making happiness the primary objective of life, gets in the way of actually becoming happy.

In one study, people were asked a number of questions about how much they value happiness and how much they believe it is important to work toward being happy. When in the midst of great stress, people were generally unhappy. For everyone else, the greater emphasis put on happiness, the least successful they were at obtaining it. It didn’t matter how happiness was defined. People putting the greatest emphasis on being happy reported 50 percent less frequent positive emotions, 35 percent less satisfaction about their life, and 75 percent more depressive symptoms than people that had their priorities elsewhere. And in case, you are shaking your head at this narrow definition of happiness, take note that people who valued happiness the most also reported 17 percent less psychological well-being (a smorgasbord of what is good in life including self-esteem, positive relations with others, etc.)

In sum, the more you value happiness, try to be happy, organize your life around trying to become happy, the less happy you end up.

...When pushed to view happiness as fundamentally important, something of profound value, how does this affect one’s ability to be happy? The researchers tested this by asking people to watch a funny movie clip after reading the newspaper. When given information about the benefits of being happy, people enjoyed the movie less. That is, people primed to value happiness became less (not more) appreciative of positive events in their immediate environment.

— read more from Todd Kashdan at FutureHealth.com

The moral, concludes Kashdan:
Be in the present moment, be open and curious, and devote your life to what matters. Do this and you are liable to catch happiness along the way (or you might not). There are better things to live for than the pursuit of a perfect mix of thoughts and feelings inside our brain.

The Consolation of Apricots

Especially in early spring,
when the sun offers a thin treacle of warmth,
I love to sit outdoors
and eat sense-ravishing apricots.

Born on sun-drenched trees in Morocco,
the apricots have flown the Atlantic
like small comets, and I can taste
broiling North Africa in their flesh.

Somewhere between a peach and a prayer,
they taste of well water
and butterscotch and dried apples
and desert simmoms and lust.

Sweet with a twang of spice,
a ripe apricot is small enough to devour
as two hemispheres.
Ambiguity is its hallmark.

How to eat an apricot:
first warm its continuous curve
in cupped hands, holding it
as you might a brandy snifter,

then caress the velvety sheen
with one thumb, and run your fingertips
over its nap, which is shorter than peach fuzz, closer to chamois.

Tawny gold with a blush on its cheeks,
an apricot is the color of shame and dawn.
One should not expect to drink wine
at mid-winter, Boethius warned.

What could be more thrilling
than ripe apricots out of season,
a gush of taboo sweetness
to offset the savage wistfullness of early spring?

Always eat apricots at twilight,
preferably while sitting in a sunset park,
with valley lights starting to flicker on
and the lake spangled like a shield.

Then, while a trail of bright ink tatoos the sky,
notice how the sun washes the earth
like a woman pouring her gaze
along her lover’s naked body,

each cell receiving the tatoo of her glance.
Wait for that moment
of arousal and revelation,
then sink your teeth into the flesh of an apricot.

— Diane Ackerman

Some people think our souls are real – others, not so much.

Some people regard the existence of a conscious soul as the only thing of which we can be certain, through direct perception.  Others hold that the physical world is the only reality there is, and that intellectual obsession with the illusion of self derives either from egotism or wishful thinking.  It is striking to me how little these two groups have to say to each other.

Excerpts from three reviews of the recent book, Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey:

Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it’s surprising that it involves consciousness. We don’t. 
— Galen Strawson
 
The core error here is a common but shockingly obvious one: the suggestion that nothing is real except what the physical sciences tell us. 
— Mary Midgley

And from the author:

“Long before religion could begin to get a foothold in human culture human beings must already have been living in soul land...I suggest that organised religion is parasitic on spirituality, and in fact acts as a restraint on it.”
— Nicholas Humphrey

The logical explanation would seem to be that some people have souls, and others look and act and talk like human beings, but there’s nobody home.

I regenerate, you regenerate, he/she/it regenerates

Why is it that a worm can regrow most of its body if severed, that a starfish can regrow from a small piece, that a salamander can regrown a severed limb or tail — but mammals who lose a limb are out of luck?

Biologists say that it’s more complicated to create a limb in a more advanced and sophisticated mammalian anatomy.  When I was in school, we called that a ‘hand-waving argument’.  It explains nothing.

There is slowly mounting evidence that mammals don’t regenerate because they have genes that instruct the body not to.  The ability to regenerate remains latent in our cells and in our genetic legacy.  A few years ago, Ellen Heber-Katz discovered a mutant mouse strain that could grow back ears and organs that were lost. The mutant mice don’t have anything that ordinary mice don’t have; rather they have lost a gene (called p21) that instructs the body not to regenerate. 

Inevitably, these insights will be applied to human healing.  Inevitable, but not fast enough —I’m impatient to see the results.

This week a paper was published by two Korean scientists with the recipe for a treatment that gets mice started on the road to regenerating severed limbs. Muscle cells are ‘de-differentiated’ back to their pluripotent state; in other words, the muscle cells are induced to become stem cells so they can grow bones and nerves and skin in addition to muscle.

This technology is poised to be ready for us by the time you and I need it.

Science News article

Animals who inspire

In March 2008 two pygmy sperm whales were trapped between a sandbar and Mahia Beach.  Malcolm Smith, a Department of Conservation worker, was notified.  He and other rescuers tried for an hour and a half to re-float the whales, but with no success.  Finally, it seemed to them that perhaps the humane thing to do would be to kill them.  But then Moko appeared and approached the pair of distressed whales.  He was able to lead them through a narrow channel to the safety of the sea.   

— Article by Susan Megles

Mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and
the

goat-footed

baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

— e e cummings

If I could fly...

Aki Suokas, a Finnish aeronautical engineer, has just finished creating a unique single-seat aircraft this week. The project was completed at Aero Friedrichshafen, and it has been dubbed the FlyNano.  It weighs 150 pounds, and is made entirely of carbon fiber composite. It flies up to 100MPH, and has a range of 40 miles before you need to refuel.  You can buy one for $40,000.

PhysOrg article

All human languages

have roots in southern Africa, between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.  Language was invented just once, and all languages have diverged from the original.

Traditional ways of looking at language compare roots of words, and look for relationships among kindred languages.  This methodology has traced Indo-European languages to a root going back only 9,000 years.  Sino-Tibetan languages may be comparably old. 

The history of language before this time has been obscure.  Quentin Atkinson has applied a methodology from genetic analysis to infer something about a much earlier origin. 

The idea is this:  Each new group of people to colonize an area begins with a handful of ‘founders’, explorers who break off from a much larger population, and emigrate to a new area for the first time.  A much larger population grows from this smaller population.  Each time this happens, some diversity is lost  In genome analysis, the result is seen in diversity of genetic varieties. 

One of the ways in which it has been inferred that the human species had its origins in Africa is that genetic diversity declines with each step that a population is removed from Africa.  Atkinson has applied the same principle to phonemes in languages.  His inference for African origin of language derives from the one observation that the diversity of phonemes (primary sounds) in languages around the world is greatest in Africa, and smaller in relation to distance from Africa.

The application of genetic analysis to language is more speculative.  It is clear that a small group of individuals has less genetic diversity than a large population, but it is less clear that the language they speak has fewer primary sounds than the language spoken around them.

Nicholas Wade in the NYTimes
Research article by Atkinson in Science magazine

The Sun shines not on us but in us. The Rivers flow not past, but through us.

John Muir, born this day in 1838

Foresight

How would we get around our cities if the streets were only wide enough for 1850 traffic?

Who would want to live in cities if they didn’t have greenways, parks, big open plazas, places to gather, places to escape, places to see the sky?

What would America be like if Frederick Law Olmsted, born this day in 1822, didn’t foresee the twentieth century from the midst of the nineteenth?

And who, today, is guiding our architecture, our research, our social policy — with our great grandchildren’s world in mind?

‘What architect so noble...as he who, with far-reaching conception of beauty, in designing power, sketches the outlines, writes the colors, becomes the builder and directs the shadows of a picture so great that Nature shall be employed upon it for generations, before the work he arranged for her shall realize his intentions.’

On the taboo against knowing who you are

We do not ‘come into’ this world; we ‘come out of’ it—as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’ Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin.

— Alan Watts

The Mistress of Vision

WHERE is the land of Luthany,
Where is the tract of Elenore?
I am bound therefor.

‘Pierce thy heart to find the key;
With thee take
Only what none else would keep;
Learn to dream when thou dost wake,
Learn to wake when thou dost sleep.
Learn to water joy with tears,
Learn from fears to vanquish fears;
To hope, for thou dar’st not despair,
Exult, for that thou dar’st not grieve;
Plough thou the rock until it bear;
Know, for thou else couldst not believe;
Lose, that the lost thou may’st receive;
Die, for none other way canst live.

Search no more—
Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.’
Where is the land of Luthany,
And where the region Elenore?
I do faint therefor.

— Francis Thompson (1859-1907), suffered from addiction to opium, lived destitute as an ascetic in London and Wales, was discovered as an artist, was harbored by a prostitute.  Young J.R.R. Tolkein counted him as a major influence.