Thanks, not just for Thanksgiving anymore

In searching for helpful tidbits on happiness, what’s astounding is the number of people trying to profit by selling the next magic bullet to happiness. It amazes me even further that people fall for it. It’s like the Atkins or Southbeach diet for happiness. Crazy.

J and I had a conversation recently about happiness and how it directs us in our lives. In the course of the talk I realized what a very happy and contented person I am, at least in comparison to those around me. There’s no magic bullet for it. I get down and depressed, angry, frustrated, the same as anyone else. But I’m thankful for the sunset. I’m thankful for a clean bed. Perhaps appreciating what you do have and not what you don’t is part of the key to happiness. But I think the Dalai Lama, the author of The Art of Happiness, captures it better than I do.

If one's life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements. And finally, there is an intense delight in abandoning faulty states of mind and in cultivating helpful ones in meditation. - Dalai Lama

So find what makes you happy in a day, baby animals or books or freshly mowed grass, close your eyes, take it in, and be glad for it. Yeah, the world may be going to hell around you, but appreciate the good things. There’s too much bad already, no need to give it more notice and power than it deserves.

And if all else fails, here’s something to cheer everyone up: agave (hint: it’s what they make tequila out of).

Elephants

When ancient humans domesticated animals, several factors contributed to their selections. After all, there are only fourteen species of animals that are considered domesticated out of the thousands of animals that existed both then and in present day. So what factors made ancient man select these fourteen? One of factors was fear level. If an animal, like a deer or buffalo, has too high of a flight factor as a species, it’s impossible to contain or herd. Another was hierarchy, the animals had to herd together well and pay attention to the human herding them. They couldn’t be too small or it wasn’t worth their time and too large meant too much feed. Humans starving to feed their livestock hardly made sense.

When Dad and I went to California recently, we had the opportunity to spend time at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and that is always a pleasure. My fav animal? Of course, the elephant. I feel little stupid saying their like big cows, but their social structure is very similar to the bovines I’m familiar with. It’s easy to just stand there and watch how the females interact and the males try to climb out of their pens to get to them.

Very farmy indeed :p

Cattle were domesticated, though, not elephants, mainly due to their size. Humans had no way of containing elephants in fences and if the giant critters wanted to wander off, I can’t imagine the gooseboy they sent to watch them up in high pasture had much choice in the matter. Even in captivity today, elephants are large enough to be dangerous, so while taming them is possible, domestication, more than likely, is not. But that hardly detracts from the amazingness of their intricate and lifelong social systems and incredible capacity to care for and take care of one another. PBS has a wonderful series on elephants titled Echo of the Elephants, following a herd on the Kenyan Amboseli National Park.

Fun elephant facts for the day:

• An elephant can drink 80 gallons of water per day.
• It’s trunk alone can hold two to two and a half gallons of water.
• It’s the only mammal that can’t jump.
• In 1916, an elephant was tried and hung for murder in Erwin, Tennessee. (Only in the south.)
• An elephant can live up to the age of seventy, or in some cases even more.
• Elephants purr just like a cat. It’s used as a means of communication.
• An adult African elephant eats approximately six hundred pounds of food a day, almost four percent of the elephant’s body weight!

Cow Facts and Kryptonite

On average, 350 squirts are needed from milking a cow to make a gallon of milk.

No wonder our hands cramp, lol.

Heard a really interesting webinar yesterday with Peter Shankman from HARO as the key speaker. For those of you not familiar with HARO, it’s Help A Reporter Out, an email that comes three times daily with listings from reporters all over looking for experts, laypeople, quotes, ect on various topics. Pretty fun. Anyway, the webinar covered “How Self-Promotion Will Change the World.” Pretty big claim. But after listening to the discussion, it makes perfect sense. If you help others more than you help yourself, it’s not self-promotion. It’s getting others to do your self-promoting for you because they like your product or brand. And building a brand or product with an unselfish, positive image these days is far more ambitious and effective than just ranting on your soapbox collection of social media sites.

You can find Peter Shankman at http://shankman.com/ or on twitter under skydiver. You can sign up for HARO at http://www.helpareporter.com/.

What was most surprising about the webinar and positive self-promotion is that the idea actually has some root in Buddhism, at least from what I can connect to what I read in “The Art of Happiness” by the Dalai Lama. Being happy and bringing happiness both involve doing for others and doing outside of yourself. We are a very me-centric culture. What if we thought about others before ourselves and spent more time analyzing how our branding, how our self-promotion, could help others rather than glorify us? What kind of a world would that be?

Probably still one where I think it’s cool that a cow can sleep standing up. :p Again, facts courtesy of http://www.funshun.com/amazing-facts/cow-animal-facts2.html. Happy day all, and fingers crossed for upcoming interviews!

Happiness

J and I were talking over supper one night (and yes, by Family Guy standards, I’m old as I say supper and davenport) but we were talking about the choices people make in life and how easy is boring (in my opinion) and hard is just like easy, only before removing all the hard parts. J argued that then hard isn’t hard but in fact easy. Hmm. Not sure I agree. Is it that easy to remove the hard parts?

I’m a firm believer that the wrong decisions, the things that don’t flow easy, the trying to fit a round peg in a square hole, are the hard decisions because the right ones, no matter how hard, will feel right in a way that nothing else does.

I started reading The Art of Happiness and the Dalai Lama calls happiness a discipline, a constant process of “identifying those factors which lead to happiness and those factors that lead to suffering. […] one then sets about gradually eliminating those factors which lead to suffering and cultivating those which lead to happiness.”

Easy huh? I’m not Buddhist, but that doesn’t mean I ignore a good point when I see one.

Happiness is as easy once the hard stuff is removed, once the hard work is done and carefully attended to. But having left the garden to go to seed, so to speak, I imagine the process harder, even painful, a required pruning that aches but heals cleanly, leaving the plant, or person, stronger than before. I suppose the first step is to identify these things which make us happy or suffer, and use firm discipline to focus on one and eliminate the other. FYI: happiness does not equal pleasure. Rather, it’s an innate peace and satisfaction, something perhaps vague and indefinable in all of us. It’s reaching out, connecting with people and the world around us, being creative and outgoing, not materialistic and selfish.

I leave you with those questions: What makes you suffer? What makes you happy? Make a list. I made mine.