Lisa Bennett's Blog, page 6

Brother Steindl-Rast on Happiness

Brother Steindl-Rast

Brother David Steindl-Rast, the Benedictine monk best known for his work on gratitude, has suggested that living a good life is a matter of learning how to strike a creative balance between meaning and purpose — which raises an important distinction between words that are often used interchangeably.

Meaning, he says, can have no purpose. Consider, for example, the “purpose” of dance. Music. A bird. Leaving aside points about the role of birds in nature, one can experience art, people, nature as meaningful in a way that is wholly different and independent from whatever purpose they might serve.

Yet “purpose” is what we are most often caught up with. The purpose of our work. The purpose of encouraging our children to do well in school. The purpose of social activism. The purpose of having a clean house. Whatever goal we set for ourselves, it is the purpose that gets most of our attention.

In a predominant focus on purpose, however, we often miss the meaning of life — which is where the experience of gratification, or happiness, lies. Or, to put this another way, sometimes we just need to relax our pursuit of a purpose-driven life in order to enjoy the point of it all.

Klaus Post

I discovered this once, about 15 years ago, when I traveled from New York City to vacation for the first time in northern California. For the low-key portion of the trip, my partner and I stayed in a beautiful inn, called The Old Milano, in a small coastal town about three hours north of San Francisco called Gualala. Over three days, it seemed we had nothing but time: time to lie on the cove-shaped beach, to enjoy delicious meals, to sleep late. But what made the biggest impression was the time I spent sitting in an adirondack chair, looking out at the Pacific Ocean, reading, writing, and watching the waves crash against an enormous boulder.

Living in New York City, I, like so many people, had typically spent my days racing from one seemingly all-important activity to another. And collectively, somehow, it seemed that put us New Yorkers at the center of the universe. But being in this quiet, spectacularly beautiful place, I could see how small we humans were in comparison. I could recognize the truth that we really all are just passing through — through a place and time and mystery much bigger than us all.

That truth, of course, was and is there all along. But it took being still — being without purpose — to experience it: the wonder of life. This, I think, is what Brother David means by the importance of striking a balance between meaning and purpose. When we focus only on our purpose, even if it is a laudatory one, we can miss the meaning.

But when we pause in the pursuit of our purpose, the meaning is right there. Clear, present, instantaneous. For me: Children provide the meaning. Love provides the meaning. Giving provides the meaning. Nature provides the meaning. Meditation provides the meaning. Buddhist and other spiritual teachings provide the meaning. A hike with a friend provides the meaning.

But balance, as Brother David says, is key. If I’d spent the rest of my days sitting on that adirondack chair, I would not be doing my part for this life I’ve been given. Purpose and meaning go hand-in-hand in the well liven life. So it is important to be still, and it is equally important to stand up for the things one believes in, whether that is working to address climate change, help the sick, or defend an innocent man in court.

Yet we must never delude ourselves into thinking our purpose is more important than life itself. And we would help ourselves to keep in mind what the ancients also knew: The good life is a life lived in balance. Who knows, it might even be the very thing today’s distinctly modern challenges are inviting us to learn, once again.

What do you think?

For more from Brother David, check out Gratefulness.org. They also have a “Word for the Day” you can receive by email. 

Filed under: Happiness Tagged: Beauty, Brother David Steindl-Rast, gratitude, Love, meaning, Parenting, purpose, relationships

The Power of Empathy

With the “Empathy and Compassion in Society” conference coming up in San Francisco next week, I am focusing once again on these two themes, which feel as comforting as old friends.

When empathy and conversation are not part of the conversation about the great social issues we face today–from income inequality to climate change to political corruption–the challenges seem too heavy, too big, too unmanageable. Similarly, in our personal lives, when empathy and compassion are not part of how we journey through personal conflicts, everything seems more harsh and bleak.

Farleyj

But even briefly remembering our basic human capacity for empathy and compassion, I feel I can breathe again.  And in that more spacious, less anxious or sad or angry place, there is also much greater potential for transformation, which is, of course, the power that lies within these two wildly misunderstood words.

As I recently wrote in Forbes, empathy is too often misunderstood as a soft trait — or more to the point, weak. But this could not be further from the truth. For empathy and compassion are far more likely to help us cultivate the genuine, deep changes we need than any approach that leaves them out. That is why the cultural thinker Roman Krznaric titled his new book, Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution.

I look forward to hearing Krznaric, Karen Armstrong, Paul Eckman, Dan Siegel, Rick Hanson, Angelica Berrie and others speak on these topics next week. Please join me if you can.

Filed under: Change, Empathy Tagged: compassion, empathy, personal change, social change, transformation

Three Traps to Avoid When Speaking About the Environment

My 15-year-old son is a smart, responsible kid with a very strong sense of right and wrong. But he groans when I remind him to toss his empty can in the recycling, and he rolls his eyes when he hears people talk about climate change.

Given that I’ve spent much of the past decade thinking about the environment (and, because I have children, thinking especially about climate change) his dismissiveness baffled me until I asked him: “Do you think taking care of the environment is stupid?”

“No,” he answered. “I think taking care of the environment is really important. What’s stupid is how people talk about it.”

Oh, right. That.

(Credit: Peter K. Bennett)

Like my son, many of us seem to think one way about the environment and feel another. That is, we think safeguarding the environment is important but we often feel alienated by the way other people talk about it. And so we don’t get as engaged as we otherwise might, which–at a time when public opinion is essential to breaking through the political deadlock on climate change–has significant consequences.

So what are the traps, and how do we avoid them? Here are three that emerged in my conversations with hundreds of Americans about climate change in recent years:

Trap #1: Being sanctimonious. There are two ways in which people who speak out about climate change (and the environment more generally) can be perceived as sanctimonious: One is by conveying a sense that they are better than other people; the other is by suggesting that their issue is more important than other issues.

The latter is an easy trap to fall into, given the ways in which climate change has the potential to change life on Earth as we know it. But is climate change truly more important than Ebola, Alzheimer’s, or cancer? Is it more important than an equitable economy? Or a functional and representative government?

Opinions may vary but this much seems clear: Suggesting that climate change (or any issue) is more important than all others is simply not helpful. It invites argument. It belies the fact that all big issues are complex and, in many ways, connected. And, perhaps most importantly, it fails to reflect how human beings experience life, which is on a much more immediate and personal level. Last year, for example, when my mother was dying, climate change became a complete abstraction to me. When I’ve been out of work, making money has been the most important thing. When I’ve been sick, getting healthy trumped everything. And people have these kinds experiences every day, which means that every time someone says climate change is the most important issue of the day, they run smack into the objection (repeatedly affirmed by polls) that says: Not to me. At least, not to me right now.

So if you want to avoid the sanctimonious trap, refrain from saying that climate change (or whatever your issue) is the most important issue of our day. Call it important; or better yet, say it concerns you for whatever personal reason it does—and whatever reason you think might be shared by the person you are talking to. Avoid implying that you know better, or in any way are better than others because of what you understand or do about the environment (even if it makes you nervous that they “don’t get it.”) And do not act as if you know best what other people should do. As one Bay Area Democrat told me: “I don’t even care if they’re right. I hate when other people try to tell me what I must do.

Trap #2. Being negative. Many environmentalists are, at heart, drawn to what they do out of love for the natural world. Yet what many other people perceive is a primary focus on the negative: that is, on all that is wrong with the natural world, or more precisely with what people are doing to the natural world. And this raises a host of negative  triggers, such as defensiveness, fear, and anxiety, which people naturally want to distance themselves from.

What is the antidote? Certainly not being positive if one thinks of that in terms of smacking a happy, cheerful face on the issue. The seriousness of climate change demands authetnicity–I would suggest, just a more full-bodied authenticity than we have been giving it. I am thinking of the kind of authenticity that makes room for reflection of the good as well as the bad in today’s natural world–and above all, in human nature itself.

Trap #3: Being alarmist. To be fair to my son, I have, on more than one occasion, reacted to his throwing recycling in the trash as if the health of the world depended upon that one action. I have, in other words, been alarmist, which tends to emerge from the tremendous mismatch between the scope of the global threats we face and the seeming insignificance of what we, as individuals, can do about them.  What we know we can control, in other words, is whether the paper and plastic end up in recycling–and so, for some of us, some of the time, those small actions are going to come with an outsized emotional force that will seem alarmist to others. (Likewise, our talk about climate change and other issues will have an edge of intensity to it.) But as we know from when we’ve been on the other side, there is also a natural predisposition to recoil from alarmist talk.

As Rory McVeigh, director of Center for the Study of Social Movement at Notre Dame University, observed: “In conventional wisdom about social movements—about what works and what doesn’t—it seems there are two things competing against each other in the climate change movement.” One is a sense of urgency, and the other is a sense of efficacy. In other words, when social movements succeed, it is often because there is a sense of urgency and efficacy. But in today’s climate movement, a sense of efficacy is lagging behind the sense of urgency. As a result, a big focus on the urgency of the issue feels uncomfortably like alarmism to many.

Avoiding this trap can be more challenging than the other two, as it requires a sense of patience that can be difficult to access, especially in the early days of becoming deeply aware of our environmental challenges. But then again, cultivating patience as the antidote to alarmism is deeply rewarding, in itself, as I will explore in a future blog post.

Thoughts? I’d love to hear from you. 

 

Filed under: Change, Climate change, Communicating effectively Tagged: climate change, Communicating, environment, green, nature, science

An Occasion for Kindness

A brief story from the Zen teacher John Tarrant, told in his wonderful book, Bring Me the Rhinoceros. I return to this again and again, as it speaks to me of the possibility of our times–and of the actions that I have come to learn truly matter.

“A friend was in the Paris Metro when a disheveled man came onto the subway train…The man seemed to be drunk or deeply disturbed; his shirt was off, he was bleeding, and perhaps he had been beaten up. He was sweating, gesturing violently, and swearing at the young women in the car. As he spoke, saliva sprayed from his mouth. It was clear, my friend said, that he wanted something, but he was also a frightening apparition and the young people in the car made themselves small and pressed back against the sides of the car, hoping not to be noticed. My friend, who is Japanese and already small, was not sure she understood what as happening, so she followed their cue and shrank back with them.

However, as the man stumbled along the aisle, an old woman whom nobody had noticed until that time reached up and took his hand. She tugged gently. His body followed her hand down, and he collapsed onto the seat beside her. As she held his head against her breast, he began sobbing. In this case, the appearance of the rhino changed things for everybody in the subway car: a moment of fear and danger became an occasion for kindness. Such a transformation is one of the truly creative acts a person can bring about.”

Filed under: Kindness Tagged: Buddhism, John Tarrant, kindness, transformation, Zen

Is It Better to Pursue–or Pause for–Happiness?

While driving yesterday, I heard this story and reflection on my favorite podcast program, Krista Tippet’s On Being. It’s from a discussion on Pursuing Happiness with the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders, held a few years ago at Emory University.

Photo by Bryan Meltz/Emory University

It resonated deeply with me throughout the day, including while hearing Naomi Klein speak in Berkeley last night about her new book about climate change. A few thoughts on that follow this excerpt, from Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, who was responding to Krista’s observation about efforts to define “happiness” and her question: Has American culture somehow been fundamentally led astray from the outset by defining happiness as a right?

Rabbi Sacks: I’d like just to reflect on one other word, which is “pursuit.” Finding happiness doesn’t necessarily follow from pursuing it. Sometimes the deepest happiness comes when you’re least expecting it. And there is a wonderful story about an 18th-century rabbi, Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, who is looking at people rushing to and fro in the town square. And he wonders why they’re all running so frenetically. He stops one and he says, “Why are you running?” And the man says, “I’m running to make a living.” And the rabbi says to him, “How come you’re so sure that the living is in front of you and you have to run to catch it up? Maybe it’s behind you and you got to stop and let it catch up with you.” Now which bits of contemporary culture do we stop and let our blessings catch up with us? Now that is called the Sabbath, which we all share. 

The Sabbath is when we celebrate the things that are important, but not urgent. And I remember once taking, you know, an atheist — I think an atheist who’s the premier child care specialist in Britain to see a little Jewish primary school and some of the stuff they do there. And she saw on Friday, you know, the little children preparing for the Sabbath, the little five-year-old mother and father blessing the five-year-old children and welcoming the five-year-old guests. She’s fascinated by this Sabbath, which she has never experienced. And she asked one five-year-old boy, “What do you like most about the Sabbath?” and he says — or “What don’t you like?” And the five-year-old boy, being an Orthodox child, says, “You can’t watch television. It’s terrible.” And then she said, “What do you like about the Sabbath?” and he said, “It’s the only time daddy doesn’t have to rush away.” Sometimes we don’t need to pursue happiness. We just need to pause and let it catch up with us.

It’s a wonderful story and hearing it felt like a gift, for it helped me re-experience the truth in it. It made me remember — as in the experience of meditation, as in the experience of writing, as in the experience of being with another human being I love — that it is in the brief pause that one also experiences what seems to be the meaning of life.

But what does this have to do with climate change, and the sense of urgency that surrounds it, or any other important cause for that matter? Just this: However important and worthy our goals, I think it is also important to remember that what all of us want, most fundamentally in this moment, is happiness; and we must try not to miss that, the genuine experience of it, in the pursuit of what we think is right. Perhaps even when things feel most urgent, it is important to pause.

You can listen to the rest of the program here.

Filed under: Climate change, Happiness Tagged: Americans, climate change, happiness, meditation, spirituality