Tag: Happiness

Skilful Management of Attention

If you, like so many each year, were diagnosed with early stage cancer you would be forgiven for dwelling in each moment afterwards on how close death is to you and, by extension, your family. Only natural, right? But when the writer Winifred Gallagher stepped out of hospital some years ago after she received her own diagnosis she resolved to not allow the cancer to “monopolise” her attention. Instead she focused on what she called “the skilful management of attention.” Rather than chemotherapy, she focused on her daily walks; rather than thoughts of her funeral, she focused on movies and the occasional 6:30 Martini.

To the best of my memory I’ve resisted positive thinking ever since I first heard about it and my best guess for why that may be is that a good portion of my identity is rooted in so-called “negative” thinking*. Were you to ask me to think positively you’d get a flat “no”, but ask me to manage my attention skilfully and, if we can agree on what “skilfully” means, I’m all ears.

The anthropologist Carlos Castenada once said “The trick [for happiness] is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.” I think it’s easier for me to think “negatively” because I’m accustomed to that way of thinking but, as Castenada points out, the amount of time I dedicate to making myself miserable (by how I allocate my attention) is the same amount time it would take to make myself “happy” by instead directing my attention, over and over, to those things that comfort and please me, even in the face of devastating circumstances.

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*Perhaps the dichotomy of positive and negative is too simplistic of a model to apply to things as complex as thoughts?

See also: I wrote a short essay for StoneWater Zen a few years ago in response to a prompt by David Loy, a Buddhist scholar: When your mind changes, the world changes. And when we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.

Our Abundant Creativity

In section 38 (“Hoarding is Toxic”) of his book The Practice, Seth Godin writes:

“Hoarding your voice is based on the false assumption that you need to conserve your insight and generosity or else you’ll run out of these qualities.”

Scarcity mindset at its finest. I recognise it in myself almost every time I post here. “Could I save this for a book instead?” “What if someone steals this?” Well, as Austin Kleon teaches us, theft goes on all the time in art and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But at the heart of these worries is the fear that if I give away these ideas nothing else will replace them. The well won’t fill back up again. And yet that’s never been the case. Sure, sometimes it’s not as full as I would like, but the well always fills back up. How can it not? I’m alive aren’t I?

Seth again:

“Abundance multiplies. Scarcity subtracts. A vibrant culture creates more than it takes.”

Amen to that.

The Paradox of Love

Viktor Frankl and his second wife, Eleonore Schwindt.

We all know it: dating is hard. On the one hand it clears any ambiguity: you both know why you’re there; but on the other hand it raises the stakes, because you both know why you’re there. But online dating is a different story. I can’t account for all the possible reasons why online dating is especially hard but I think one significant reason is that every dating app is in the business of dating, not love. They provide a platform for people to meet but how useful is that platform if every aspect of its design from its colours to the way people show interest (i.e. swiping) is only to keep me on the app and ultimately pay for upgrades? It’s all counterintuitive.

Sometime this past summer I remembered a quote I found on Wikipedia years ago by Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor:

[…] happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself[.]

– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

As with happiness, so with love, I think. It sneaks up on us. The wave of a hand. The way someone calls our name to say goodbye, and they really mean it. Who knows what summons love?

A swipe right?