Happier and Interesting

The Tuesday (Nov 28, 2006) issue of the free daily newspaper here, tbt, carried a news article entitled “How to be happier”. Citing a variety of research experiments, the article enumerated several simple exercises that we can engage on a daily basis. I’ve tried each within the short span (actually more than an hour) of blogging here as listed below:

Think of 3 good things that happened during the day and analyzed why they occurred.
1) Our order of the silver-colored Canon SLR Camera arrived today as promised by Staples.com because they have a reputation to upkeep.
2) Received an email from back home regarding a potential consultancy stint because I keep my contacts intact.
3) Upon return from his trip back to his homeland, my Turkish colleague brought pistachio and hazel nuts to the office to share (And my wife loves them). All because I work in a great firm that values good people and recruits them wherever they may be.

Discover your personal strengths, choose the five most prominent, then everyday for a week, apply one or more of these strengths in a new way.
1) I blog, and vary my theme from day to day, hence aPleasant Surprise(s).
2) I do numerical modeling, and just learn a new one today, BOUSS-2D. Never mind if you don’t know what it is. The important thing is for me to know how to use it wisely and to clients’ satisfaction.
3) I read, and stumble upon a piece of interesting news that I will blog later on here.
4) I treat my daughter as my peer, and she starts to share her stuff with me. Like today, she told me she will participate in the Winter Wonderland the school organizes this Friday where she will make goo (?) with elementary school kids.
5) I love my wife, and so she has become the copy editor of my blog lest my momentary lapse of mental clarity introduce things that are not for public consumption into my blog, a reality check of sort.

Work on savoring the pleasing things in life.
Seeing the diversity of traffic to my blog, for one. Reading comments on my blog for another. It seems my life has become more blog-centric by the day.

Write down what you want to be remembered for, and bring daily activities in line with what’s really important.
A loving husband by my wife; an even-handed father by my kids; a responsible and responsive professional by my colleagues; an approachable friend by my peers; and a smiling man by any stranger. And to all that, just be myself.

Regularly practice random acts of kindness.
Let's see, yes, letting an on-coming car come into my lane first. You see, we usually cut through a residential area on the way home when ferrying my daughter after school. Often, there are cars parked by the road side, taking up more than half of one lane and making two lane traffic difficult. Usually, the rule of thumb is just like approaching a 4-way junction, first in first out. But sometimes we do come across a particularly patient driver who stops first and waves us by. So today I did the same, and was acknowledged for the courteous move, a simple wave of the hand and a slight nod.

It does feel good, to be engaged in any of the above activities. Try some yourself.

Now, for the interesting news. The headline reads Global warming case goes to Supreme Court. The byline is “Watchdog groups, 12 states call for U.S. regulation of greenhouse gases”.

It pits environmental groups and a dozen states as the plaintiff (known as Massachusetts) against EPA, along with 10 states, four motor vehicle trade associations and two coalitions of utility companies and other industries as the defendents (known as EPA), contending that the “U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s mandate to shield Americans from harmful pollution includes putting limits on car, truck and power plant emissions that have been shown to hasten climate change” within the ambit of the Federal Clean Air Act, in a pivotal case before the Supreme Court.

On the other hand, the defendants' stand is that “carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas that does not fit the U.S. Clean Air Act’s definition of a pollutant”.

And the protagonists:
On the plaintiff side: Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington state; the cities of Washington D.C., New York and Baltimore; the government of American Samoa; and 13 environmental groups.

On the defendant side: EPA, Michigan, Texas, Idaho, North Dakota, Utah, South Dakota, Alaska, Kansas, Nebraska and Ohio, and numerous industry groups, including the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents nine car makers including the so-called “Big Three.”

See whether you’re surprised by any of the state entries in either camp, other than Texas of course. This case is interesting to me because this is the first time I’m seeing states on opposite sides of a court case. Wonder whether the people have any say in the professed stands adopted by the litigant states. And now the bummer, “a ruling is expected by the middle of next year”.

Invisible Writing

“Seasons of the Heart”. That’s the name of the book just next to me while I was laboring to blog, hunched over the keyboard, eyes darting around looking for ideas. Written and compiled by Paul C. Brownlow, it also features the art of Charles Yosocki. Published in 1997, the book celebrates the perennial renewal of the four seasons, characterizing each one in turn as:

• spring as the seasons of joy & happiness;


• summer as the seasons of love and friendship;


• autumn as the seasons of peace and thanksgiving;


• winter as the seasons of faith and hope.

Upon further inquiry, I learned that my wife has bought the book at a library book sale. After reading some of the passages, I find that they are congruent with the concept of happiness and heroism that I’ve blogged previously. Here are some excerpts that I would like to share for both the eloquent stylish writing and the profound meaning and yet simple truism that the verses radiate:

“ … Happiness consists not of having, but of being; not of possessing, but of enjoying … Happiness represents a peaceful attunement of a life with a goal. It can never be made by the individual, by himself, for himself. It is one of the incidental by-products of an unselfish life … The greatest of the world’s heroes could not by any series of acts of heroism do as much real good as any individual living his whole life in seeking, from day to day, to make others happy.” -- Seasons of Happiness by William George Jordan

And you can take my word that the accompaniment of the beautifully drawn images is just amazing. What a pleasant surprise and what keen eyes my wife has for picking up such a gem.

And before that during a break in the Dharma talk that I was attending tonight, I learned of this writing level called invisible writing from the January 1994 issue of Writer’s Digest that any worthy writer should aspire to. Written by William G. Tapply on how he has learned his craft from his father, himself a writer, he related how his father summed up the art of invisible writing in the following words:

“Don’t try to impress your reader with how cleverly you write. These fancy words, all these adjectives and adverbs and vocabulary words, all they do is call attention to you. You don’t want your reader aware of your writing at all. If you do your job, you’ll have them thinking about your ideas, your arguments, your characters, or whatever it is you’re trying to communicate. If someone tells you, “Wow, that’s great writing,” you know you’ve failed.”

Hmm, have I been doing that? Agonizing over which word to use in order to impress the readers of my blogs as to the breadth of my vocabulary? Changing the context in order to suit a particular word? All at the expense of letting the readers enjoy the story?

At first read, it does seem counter-intuitive that being complimented on a great piece of writing is no compliment at all. However, on reflection, isn’t that our common affliction, forsaking substance for the form? Writing is just a means to an end, which is the idea, the message, carried in the writing. We would not want to embed the idea so deep in verbiage that it is usurped by the embellishment, the flowery prose and the pretentious phraseology.

Clear. Concise. Unpretentious. These are the hallmarks of invisible writing. That’s my take of the article. While my encounter with the idea of invisible writing is a pleasant surprise, that ‘Seasons of the Heart” turns out to be an epitome of invisible writing in my reckoning is equally pleasant and surprising.

People Who Never Live and Who Live to Suffer

We grow up surrounded by fictional characters. Boys have GI Joe, Superman, Ultraman and a host of other hyphenated men characters while girls play with Barbie dolls and the like. Then there are the Disney cartoon and comic book characters who are a constant source of amusement. Now Messrs. Lazar, Karlan, and Salter have written The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived, listing their nominees with strong arguments for each. You may disagree, subconsciously supplanting some of them with your very own. To each his/her own. I have yet to read the book, so this pleasant surprise is made in anticipation.

I came across a big word today, one that I’ve encountered before but have not bothered to look it up. It’s existentialism. The online dictionary defines it as “a 20th-century philosophical movement; assumes that people are entirely free and thus responsible for what they make of themselves”. To my mind, freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin; we cannot have one without the other.

However, Victor E. Frankl, in his book entitled Man's Search for Meaning, has an interpretation that is somewhat akin to Buddhist teaching: “to live is to suffer; to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.” This certainly rings true, albeit tinged with a tad of sorrow that life tends to throw at us. However, Mr. Frankl turns it around to admonish that we “say yes to life”. The longer version taken from his book is more revealing, explicit and easy to relate that makes it my pleasant find of the day:

“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as an unintended side-effect of one’ personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run – in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”

“Happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue.” Think about it.