The Pursuit of Happiness

I’ll begin with something that I think everybody can agree on, we strive for happiness and try to keep pain to a minimum. An easy concept when you’re sitting down and reading about it, but it’s a little harder to put it into practice.

I know that I’m at my happiest when I write, so why do I avoid doing it; consistently putting it off for days or sometimes even weeks on end, only to finally get so frustrated with my procrastination that I actually sit down and write. My writing becomes an act of my frustration rather than a vehicle to happiness.

As I sit down and relax into my writing, I begin to enjoy it again. The thought of doing becomes the doing and everything else attached to that thought disappears, only to be left by the doing.

If you apply logic to this line of thinking then it’s the frustration (insert any emotion here) that’s the catalyst to achieve happiness. It’s not like I do this for a living, deciding to write blogs is my choice not my job.

I’ve read many biographies on writers who feel this way. How can you explain the fact that it takes years to produce a standard length novel. But it should take 220 days (assuming to produce one page per day is not too much writing and that writers also erase, edit, shred more than one page to produce that one page).

It’s the process of art that yields the art, not the intention to create a specific piece of art.

I wonder if happiness is like a plotted course. We’re always going to get off course so we must make constant adjustments to remain there once our internal indicator flashes: OFF COURSE…OFF COURSE.

It’s not surprising that we get off course considering the mixed signals that we get from our 9 to 5 jobs (assuming you’re lucky enough to have one). Being occupied with producing, leaves us very little time to measure our self worth not by a happiness quotient rather by how efficient or how much money am I making my employer quotient. This is probably why the dream to win the lottery and retire early is so alluring (me included) in our culture.

It’s also not surprising that we get off course to happiness because of the mixed signals that we get from advertisers, working for corporations that tell us that their product will make you happy. I’m not saying that material possessions won’t make you happy…hey, I love my iPod…but here’s the rub, I was under the delusion that acquiring things will make me happy; it turns out that once I turned on that happiness through acquisition switch it actually raised the bar on what made me happy with each purchase I made. And now that one purchase doesn’t make me happy anymore…so I go to the next and the next…I should be in ecstasy. Have you noticed how the next new thing just comes out as the novelty of the previous purchase wears off? Or is it because the novelty has worn off because it’s newer or better than what you just purchased.

If your work makes you happy or if money makes you happy, I envy you. With all of my hours of reading self-development books, making lists, putting into practice what writers and coaches have suggested, I’ve found that happiness is something that I must actively pursue.

Maybe happiness is just as fleeting as the happiness from the purchases that we make. Just like the experienced shopper, we need to constantly pursue it; not as an item but as a philosophy.

The Lost Art of Experimentation

Experimentation has gone the way of the Maltese Falcon and the ever elusive perfect mate. We are constantly adding work tasks, home tasks, return-phone-call tasks, and reply-to-email tasks. It’s a world where the next thing to do is replacing the life that we’re all searching to live (mental note: Add, “find a life” to my task list).

What happened to experimentation? You try something and if it didn’t work out, you took what you learned and tried something else. Are we so busy and so programmed by the media that we not only base our values as human beings on the right combination of possessions and status dictated by the media? Do we not have enough time to make mistakes? Whatever happened to trial and error?

Trial and error has been so misinterpreted it’s worth redefining: it’s a process whereby you find the best way to reach a desired result by noting and eliminating errors or causes of errors; eliminating one way of not doing something you start yourself on a path to reach your desired goal.

On one occasion a young journalist challenged Edison saying to him, "Mr. Edison, why do you keep trying to make light by using electricity when you have failed so many times? Don't you know that gas lights are with us to stay?

Edison replied, "Young man, don't you realize that I have not failed but have successfully discovered six thousand ways that won't work!"

Let’s look at the airplane autopilot analogy. In order to take its passengers on the correct navigational path, the internal guidance system computer keeps correcting the path of the airplane when the sensor detects that the plane is off the programmed path (i.e. drift).

When I write, I compose my sentences, choosing and changing words, rearranging sentences until I find the right combination of words and sentences that express my meaning. For me composition is just another word for trial and error.

As I go through this process, I find that I’m learning more and more, my prose is taking on figurative qualities (a happy side effect of wordplay) that I re-integrate into my prose, giving the overall composition more dimension as well as another level of meaning. This in turn gives my writing a uniqueness that expresses a style, soon to flourish as my own style.

Making mistakes is a part of the human condition. In many cases we gain valuable personal insight and gain rewarding experiential knowledge when we develop our own models rather than model ourselves around the success of others.

It’s like reading a travelogue, you know its itinerary, but you can’t experience the trip unless you go yourself. And even then your experience will not be the same as some one else’s trip.

I suppose that’s the only reason to experiment…so you can give your experiences to the world. For me, experience and experiment mean being alive rather than living a life.