The Happiness Survey

There was a sixteen paragraph article in my newspaper yesterday devoted to “A first-of-its-kind global study” that finds a link between money and happiness.

Is this a no-brainer, or what?

“Pulling in the big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall—whether they are young or old, male or female, or living in cities or remote villages, the survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries found.”

One of the interpretations the researchers made was that when people are asked about income and satisfaction, the first thing they do is take stock of their lives, and that involves comparison. They check to see how their lives compare with “the Joneses” (an expression I haven’t heard in years). I suppose this could be true to some extent, but I doubt it’s a major cause except maybe among those who only “see themselves” as not having enough. Truly not having enough money to survive, or to do things like keep your house and still eat, or not having enough to avoid bankruptcy due to the loss of a job, do not involve comparison. “Times” they say, “are hard.” You don’t too often hear, “These are unhappy times,” but when you say “times are hard” you are generally saying that a lot of people are under a lot of stress.

Many other factors that contribute to happiness were spoken of in the article – as if to downplay the finding about income (in my view).

I’ve had arguments about this with people – about it being easier to be happy and peaceful when you’ve got money. I get it that people can have a lot of money and still be miserable and vice versa, don’t get me wrong, but I truly feel that this could be a great opportunity to look at this issue (or truism) head on. In a world in which poverty is growing so rapidly, how do you ignore it?

A young man I know was just told by his employer – a major bank – that he had to take a $5 an hour pay cut or lose his job. With the CEO and execs making what this bank’s CEO and execs do, how can you reconcile the need for the bank to take such an extreme action against its already low-paid tellers? This is a huge amount of money -- $800 a month – suddenly gone from a young guy’s budget. For what reason? On top of the anxiety of having to figure out how to meet his expenses, the unfairness, the arbitrariness, the “they’re doing it because they can” feeling of it, eats away at his happiness. He is not alone.

This survey was taken before the world economy took a nosedive, so I can only imagine that the answers would be even more strongly in the affirmative concerning money and happiness now, but it’s not just that life is harder and more stressful when there are survival types of financial concerns, but that there is such an overriding feeling of unfairness in the great divide between the rich and the poor, the highest wage earners in a company and the lowest, and the lack of choice. This is not a matter of comparison with the Joneses as I understand that phrase to imply – a keeping up with the neighbors kind of thing. This is more of a feeling that something has gone terribly wrong…and it’s being felt up close and personal by a ton of people.

One percent of American people control 40 percent of the wealth; 5 percent control 60 percent. As non-violent peace activist Marv Davidov says, “Whoever owns it; runs it.” It is not a mystery where this has taken us. It does not bode well for democracy.

It seemed to happen overnight or somewhere out there in the dark reaches of the last few decades, to sneak up while nobody was looking and change all the rules. It’s like we were the last to know. Like we were duped into believing there was still an equality and an American way of doing business that wanted everyone to benefit in due measure.

In the end I figured the word “happiness” was the problem, but no matter what word I'd substitute – like well being or fulfillment or satisfaction – I still find income being a major contributor because, with a feeling of the threat of doom and few options hovering about you, that sense of happiness that comes of ease and freedom from anxiety is going to be hard to come by.

And what I came up with was that, at least to me, happiness has some connotation of contentment with the status quo. If you’re not content with “the way things are” you are challenged to change, to live differently, to find some other way. I figure you gain lots of depth and fulfillment from that challenge and start appreciating your life and its different aim and you might even, if you’ve got some breathing room, feel happy about that. But in terms of what the Gallup corporation means by happiness, I don’t know if this would apply.

The other thing I came to was that, while you might not be happy with the way things are, you might ultimately become happy with yourself. You might feel a greater sense of purpose and come to recognize your strength and resiliency. Your relationships might, when you’re in a financial crisis, (as in any sort of crisis) have that chance to evolve into something richer than they were (if the stress doesn’t tear them apart first). You are almost forced to become a little more aware of what really matters.

Which all leads back to the fact that we’re in a world financial crisis and no matter anyone’s individual financial status, the suffering it’s brought, the obscurely blatant causes of it, and the need for fundamental change, creates its own unhappiness with “the way things are” and those concerns can eat away at you like dread.

It’s still perfectly possible to get up in the morning and greet your day and your trees with love and appreciation…even really heightened appreciation and gratitude…even appreciation that doesn’t hold dread even while it does hold concern. You’re amazed at the ability of the earth to sustain the human family and the sun to warm it and the freeway noise not to drive us all crazy.

I don’t know, I guess it’s just that the ability to find happiness from those essential qualities of self and relationship that sustain us – I don’t want to see them being used as an excuse for not changing this elitist culture. You could call this a belated Independence Day acknowledgment that a “ruling class” was not what was intended in the creation of this nation, and nor was an acceptance of greed as good.

We can maybe rejoice that more people are concerned, even if their actions are not yet skillful and, besides carrying a handkerchief, let our empathy and outrage grow hand-in-hand.

Jimmy Buffet is due to give a concert on the gulf coast. He said it was what he thought to do after feeling the rage that all people who feel “as if the coast is in them” can’t help but feel. You feel the rage but you can’t live there.

One spiritual person, the mystic and writer Andrew Harvey, recommends sacred activism in his book The Hope. He combines our spiritual heart and desire for soulful change with a reclaiming of our heart for social change.

I am still, like so many people, stunned by my family’s decline of the last few years. On the one hand, I feel grateful that we get by, and on the other, I rail at the freedoms lost. But I guess at some point I quit beating myself up for my sense of unhappiness with the way things are. I’ve realized that the general milieu of hard times and even a direct association with its hard edge, don’t deprive me of joy in all those things that still touch my heart or lift my spirit and that it is those same things, and that same joy, that call out for concern and attention to the great change we’re undergoing, socially as well as spiritually.

"They say money can't buy love -- but what about happiness?" by Rob Stein, Washington Post, as reported in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, 7-6-2010, 1A.

Doing The Days 2: Transition

I’ve really wanted to finish Andrew Harvey’s book “The Hope” and maybe write a real review of it. I promised myself one, more or less, when I began it. I was highly hopeful. So far it’s been good in that way I was anxious for it to be. It’s got a lot of Andrew Harvey in it. But other things break in like the smell of Earl Grey tea. Like grief. I guess I’m not quite done with either of them yet.

I’m fully stuck on my old-friend book “Early Morning,” now, but before that it was "The Dialogues," and then the feeling of needing to read a snippet or two of Elizabeth Lesser’s “Broken Open.” Today I remembered that I wanted that book for hearing Elizabeth say on the radio that she loves grief. It came back to me in that same way grief-related things have been doing. The last few days.

The last few days.

When I put down Andrew Harvey’s book he was talking about suicide, a sort of living grief that makes you want to die, and the danger it can be to the activists who come to know too much about suffering. It’s one of the reasons he chose to add “sacred” to activism – the idea of being really grounded in the sacred before you take on too much. If you take on too much without that grounding you can grow bitter, angry, despondent, or just plain hurt too much to go on.

The thing is, when a wave of grief hits you almost three years later, about a year-and-a-half after everything started to feel less raw and tender, you wonder more about it and if it has something to do with the present.

You wonder, What’s going on inside of me?

That kind of question can get too heady, almost like a means of escape from feeling what you feel. “Let’s root out the source. Let’s understand it and be done with it.”

Maybe I’ve already done some of that. Maybe I’ve said enough or too much. It feels gentle though, and I say that because of a letter I got today: a Course of Love reader asking me how you know. How do you know your feelings as they are? Without thinking about them? I said, in that way that surprises me sometimes, (as if I’ve found the right thing to say by accident), that you can tell by the gentleness.

A feeling like grief can feel awful and still be gentle…even when you’re thinking about it.

So I’m re-visiting grief. Or it's re-visiting me. Gently. That’s what I’ll say. We're sharing a visit. And I’m aware that we're visiting for a reason. I don’t know what it is, (even though I’ve had some clues) but I’ll accept that I don’t know.

I hope the grief doesn’t have anything to do with the fights I’ve had with my daughter the last few days, but it might. How do you know (when you don’t know)?

We suffered a loss the other day because of our general financial situation. Our finances seem all intertwined and that gets to you for one thing. But a loss is a loss. My husband, with more Course of Love-like language than me, says it’s no loss. My daughter doesn’t see it as much of one either. Me, the perennial worrier – the “spiritual” person who shouldn’t be this way – is feeling the losses.

Transition

So tonight “The Dialogues” joins the list of signs (or whatever they are). Doing another day of the 40 Days, what do I notice? All the talk about transition.

At this point, all I can say is that “transition” sounds a lot better than change and loss. We go through what we go through for bigger reasons than appear to be. This much I know.

Moon Yet

It’s that time of the year again—time to adjust around the cold. A huge wind blew in late in the day yesterday and kept up all night. I good sized tree limb, although not large enough to have done any real damage had it hit the cabin, and that looks a fine and hardy fellow except for being rather pale, landed between the fire pit and the cabin. As I look out the window, it sits as if pointing to St. Francis, who sits beneath my window, part of an idea (like so many I have that don’t come with a plan), of creating a shrine.

It’s almost October and the 50 degree weather in and out of the cabin is normal, perfectly appropriate for a Minnesota Fall, and I wonder if it was working half the summer, precisely half if you think of summer as June through August, that makes the change more unexpected than usual. It was, for all it’s shortness, a perfect July and August. I was so appreciative of being “out” (as if I’d escaped prison).

I had a vision three years ago. The shrine “idea” came from that. I speak of “vision” and “idea” newly since listening to the stories of Sandy White Hawk (with appreciation and also some envy). My friend Sandy was adopted away from her family and put in the “better” home of a white, Christian family. Her work now, her sacred activism, is in welcoming adoptees back to the tribe. It started with what she called an idea – the idea of having a song to welcome them back. She told her spiritual leader about this idea and he said, “That’s not an idea, that’s a vision.” Sandy told me how things unfolded after that. She was responsible for the vision – the resources of her small tribal community were there to support her. She’s brought this vision to fruition.

My vision, like all else in my life, was not so specific. It was about joining lands of peace, creating sacred space, and creating sacred friendships. It’s written in Creation of the New (which I’m only now adding to my website, so if you’d like to see it, check it out in a week or a month – I started this blog partially because website updates take time and money).

Although the word “shrine” came to me within the vision, I didn’t make much of it until my dad was dying. In one of those awful nursing home days when I was trying to get him a new bed after his quit adjusting for sitting and laying positions, and he was a little less than fully himself, and there were three of us “Perron” women in the room and in a bit of an uproar, he said, “Make a _______.” I must have asked him three times what the final word was and I thought at first it was “stink.” “Make a stink.” But it turned out it was “Make a shrine.”

Back track a year or so to when Donny was finishing up work on the cabin and my neighbor, Mr. Mooney, was repaving his driveway. A bunch of dirt was being dug up and he asked us if we’d like any of it. Donny decided it would be a great idea to make a little more of a yard around the cabin and had it dumped along the edge that joins our two yards. I was going to shovel it – distributing it evenly over the weedy growth between where it landed and the cabin. I did shovel some, but what was left was a mound about the size of a grave. After my dad died it became “Dad’s mound,” and his shrine.

St. Francis and other notables were going to dot its edges and flowers were going to grow like a blanket of snow across it. I got about as far with that as I did with the shoveling. St. Francis still sits in front of the cabin because I always thought I was going to do more with the mound – more planting, or more work around it. I didn’t, although my husband, just this year, planted moon flowers. Again this was about as good as it gets as my dad was enamored by the moon and would call me a few times a year to ask, “Did you see the moon yet?” After Henry was born, I’d take him out at night to see the moon and one of his first words was “moon” which got morphed into “moon-yet,” as we’d go out so often before full dark and I’d say, “No moon yet.”

You might say these cool outcomes came of a habit of allowing things to come, and it feels great, absolutely perfect, even divine, especially over time and with time’s ability to bring that “just right” feeling that tells you it turned out perfectly without your interference…until it begins to knock up against a feeling that you need to do a thing or two to help a vision along. Then “needing to do something” and “letting things happen as they will” begin to duke it out.

That feeling is always hovering in the background and it’s come to the forefront now for a lot of reasons: a new book coming out (and so things that need to be done), a desire stronger than ever before (since working, briefly, in the corporate world) to have a real vocation, and the way Andrew Harvey’s vision reminded me of my own.

Yet, if I know anything, anything at all, I know that this is the time to resist defining anything too specifically, to resist like hell the organizing/institutionalizing principal that has fueled the way we all once got things done. My constant question is “How do you do things newly?”

I suspect it’s like waiting for the moon. When there’s no moon yet, there’s no moon yet and, when there is a moon, you might need someone to ask you, “Have you seen the moon yet?”

Sacred Activism

Three years ago, almost to the day, I discovered Andrew Harvey anew after having read and loved the opening section of his book “The Direct Path,” and becoming frustrated with the second. “The Direct Path” was published in 2000 and I’m unsure when between 2000 and 2006 I read it, or if it might have been in the phase I went through of wanting to throw all teaching books against the wall. I got it out again today and it looks pretty good. Until getting reacquainted with Andrew Harvey in 2006, I know I’d mentioned several times that I hated books like his where the author draws you in with a first chapter that tells a personal story and then, just when he’s got you, launches into whatever it is he/she thinks you need to know.

Anne Lamott put it really distinctly in an interview once when she talked of books that were helpful being neither honest or dishonest (like guidebooks for parents full of facts). She, personally, was always looking for the honest rather than the helpful and it was why she wrote a few of her books – there were plenty of helpful ones out there but none with that feel of one person’s experience: the good/bad, sad/crazy, horrible/beautiful kind that makes you laugh and cry, feel not so alone, and even at times, gives you a clue as to how to proceed with some grace.

My re-acquaintance with Harvey was a stunning one. I’d been out with my friend Mary the night before. We started off to go to a book signing I wanted to attend and that she was obviously half-hearted about, and had it turn out, for no explainable reason, to simply not exist. I’d seen it in the paper but the bookstore employee didn’t know a thing about it, not one other anxious, book-toting attendee was in sight, and the store didn’t even carry the book. Mary perked up right away and we went across the street for a beer. Sitting outside feeling provincial as we St. Paulites watched the Minneapolis passers by, we talked.

In the morning she called me; breathless. “Did you see the new issue of “Spirituality and Health?”

I said, “No.”

She said, “You’ve got to see this. I’m coming over.”

I’ve got a backyard cabin that my husband built for me, an acceptance of a yearning I had for about a thousand times more solitude than I could get. Mary and I headed there. We sat on the floor. She read me practically the whole article.

“I thought for sure you had to have seen this,” she said, “it’s everything you were talking about last night.”

Over the years since sitting on the floor with Mary, getting as excited as she about what she was reading, I’ve thought of Harvey often. But my brain’s been fuzzy since some mystical experiences of my own. I got, and then lost the journal, my dad died, my grandson was born, I wrote a book and pretty soon I couldn’t remember if it was Andrew Harvey or Andrew Cohen whom I’d so briefly fallen in love with and remembered so fondly.

It was, as far as I know, Harvey’s first public pitch for sacred activism, a vision that is now coming to fruition. I found this out on-line by accident (as seems to be the way I’m finding everything these days). He has a new book and a busy speaking schedule. The book is called “The Hope.” I ordered it, even though I’ve been on a strict no book-buying budget lately. But I hope it’s not a repeat of “The Direct Path.” There’s a point when all the teaching/organizing/institutionalizing begins to wear on you, no matter how spot-on or well meant.

I just want to know more about Andrew Harvey. I want to hear about his vision and what he feels but not have him map out the path for me. I don’t know why. I feel that if I knew why I could probably make a ton of money talking about it, because I think it’s the change that’s in the midst of happening. It’s my version of the Anne Lamott yen for honesty over fact and information.

I’ll let you know what I find when the book arrives, but I know one thing already: Harvey and I share the same feeling of whatever is coming being brought on by the broken heart. The broken, or at least open heart, is the antidote to the world’s deadness, the same-old, same-old, inability, or unwillingness to change that gets us all battered and bruised like old boats tied to a dock in the storm. It’s our hearts we have to follow out to open sea.