Archive for the ‘Happiness’ Category

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A Great Game

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

I have written often in this space – and particularly lately – about winning and losing. This is in part because my father was a devoted gamer, and games were how we spent much of our time together when I was young. We played these games to have fun, but part of the having fun was caring whether you won or lost, and this was not always so pleasant and did not always bring out the best in me.

My mother did not play games, however, and when it was just she and my brother and sister and I we liked to tell each other stories. I loved stories because here a group of people could join one another through the shared portal of their separate imagination, and by the end of the story you had arrived someplace together you hopefully all wanted to be.

One day when I was twelve my father came home with a new game. It was called Dungeons & Dragons. This was different than any other game. Sure there were dice and rules and pieces you moved around, but in this game there was no winning and losing. In this game, which was really like a story you were all telling together, the only goal was to have fun. If you had fun, everybody won.

My two worlds had come together and I, along with a lot of other teenage boys in the late 70s and early 80s, became obsessed with the game. My obsession has since faded, albeit so slowly that I would still be playing enough as an adult to more or less get paid to do so, but my admiration for the game remains. Yes it’s geeky, yes you end up saying things like, “I think Silence should actually be a 3rd level spell,” but this is beside the point. This game celebrated play, which is the mutual pursuit of happiness, which is actually a celebration of life.

Everything in life we think we want – the publishing contract, the house, the girlfriend, the big promotion – all of it we want because we believe having it will make us happy. Even those things we don’t want to do, those tasks and jobs and obligations about which we complain the most, we do because we believe we will suffer, and therefore be less happy, if we don’t do them. What a great game indeed: a story told for the pleasure, where anyone can be whatever he or she wants, and where it doesn’t really matter when you die.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!

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Sea of Discontent

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

I was visiting an old friend in New York when the subject of happiness came up. I had not seen this friend in a while and I knew that though he was usually cheery and curious his life at that moment was not unfolding as he had hoped. I knew his marriage was not always the refuge he would have liked and that he was becoming bored with his job.

“I figured out,” he told me, “that happiness isn’t normal.”

I told him he was wrong. I told him that happiness was absolutely normal, that happiness was our natural state of being. He seemed unconvinced.

Several years later I was writing a blog. I typed the last period and sat back. For a moment, I felt that satisfaction that comes when a piece of work feels like something someone else has written that I am delighted to have discovered. For a moment, I was content.

But no sooner had I closed the file than I felt something else stirring in me – a little, glowing coal of dissatisfaction. Somewhere within that finished piece was something unfinished. Somewhere in one sentence was an idea that had surprised me, and that I had used in what I knew was only a germinal form. I could no longer think about that satisfying finished piece. It didn’t need me. As I rose from my desk, it was almost as if I had succeeded not in finishing something, but only in discovering something else that required my attention.

In this way, I think my friend was right. If happiness means never experiencing the discomfort that comes with feeling pulled toward, but not yet knowing where to find, something new and interesting, then I suppose it is most unnatural. So it goes. But if you want to know unhappiness, live for a day with nothing of interest tugging at your attention. Then you are lost in your own home, and the blank page is already full of the emptiness you are living.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!

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Quiet Time

Monday, May 7th, 2012

When I was twenty-five I sat down to write my first novel. I had already written and submitted many short stories, had published some poetry, had written and produced my own play, and I had been to Hollywood where I had written a screenplay that garnered the attention of a B Movie film director.

And yet, when I sat down to write that novel, when I said to myself, “Experimentation is over. I must now succeed at this and make money at this,” my relationship to my writing changed. Everything about it became immediately harder. I felt as if I had forgotten how to tell a story, something I had been doing effortlessly my entire life. My writer’s voice, which I had been working deliberately to loosen since I was thirteen, constricted. Even my sentence-to-sentence craft devolved. I wrote everyday with determination and dedication, but very little joy.

The problem, I thought, were all those words on the page. If I could find the right words and put them in the right order then I would have the success I absolutely required. Yet this idea of finding the right words and putting them in the right order felt increasingly like trying to hit a moving target: what seemed like the right words one day did not the next. Writing had become a descent into a hall of mirrors, which instead of leaving I was merely building and building and building.

I suppose this is why I am so skittish when it comes to talk of craft. Though my work did not always reflect it, when I sat down to write my first novel I had all the technical ability a writer would need to tell a story he wanted to tell. All that time spent staring at words would have been far better spent waiting for a story I wanted to tell to arrive.

In this way I have learned that a writer needs patience more than intelligence, wit, or craft. A writer must have the patience to do nothing, to quiet himself and release the noise of the day so he might hear what is already speaking within him. Tricky that, since this is a voice no one else can hear – unless, of course, we choose to speak it.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!

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The Search For Happiness

Friday, May 4th, 2012

It had been one of those weeks and we decided to keep Sawyer home from school. Usually Sawyer doesn’t want to leave the house when school catches up with him, but on this day he suggested we go to the Japanese hobby store that he visited with his camp last summer. He had suggested this before, but I did not know where this store was, and he said he did not either. On this day, however, he said, “It’s near the music store where I got my guitar and then had to give it back.”

So we went, driving past the music store and down into a vast, chain-link fenced wasteland of a parking lot surrounding the Gene Juarez Hair Salon Academy. We parked by a crowd of young women smoking cigarettes and laughing. When I was a teenager I was drawn to girls with black, black hair who wore a bit too much makeup and very tight pants. There was no subtlety in their fashion sense, and I appreciated this. Life seemed to be accelerating in its capacity for complication, and I hoped their company could slow this down. When I would see one, I was frequently overcome with urgency. “Go to her now, Bill,” I would hear. “What if she is the answer?”

As Sawyer and I left the car and began our search for the Japanese hobby store, it seemed as if we had stumbled upon a beehive of girls with midnight black hair, too much makeup, and tight pants. Winding our way out of the parking lot and then up the street toward the mini-mall behind the Academy, another and then another and another emerged from a car or appeared from a doorway.

Sawyer did not notice the swarm of future-beauticians. He was looking for the hobby store, and with every step he took desperation that he would not find it began to grow in him. Arriving at the mini-mall he became frantic. “It used to be here! I know it was here!”

Then we passed a small urban clothing store and Sawyer stopped. “I think it used to be there.” His voice choked. “I remember that counter.” I ducked inside and the clerk confirmed what Sawyer feared. I stepped outside and broke the news.

“No!” Sawyer howled. I led him to a bench and sat next to him while he wept. “It’s ruined,” he cried. “Everything’s ruined. All my happiness is gone!”

All the things I thought to say at that moment I had the good sense not to. I waited and he eventually wiped his face dry and suggested we visit a different store. We walked together back to our car, all his desperation drained out of him now, weaving our way through beautician after beautician. Always the writer, I was still thinking about what I might have said on that bench, wondering if I could ever answer my son’s questions as articulately as life just had.

Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!

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Don’t Think About It

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Like a lot of people, the first philosophical aphorism I learned was Decartes’s classic: I think therefore I am. Whenever I encounter this nugget I am reminded of the Buddha’s answer to the question: “Where do thoughts come from?” He was supposed to have said, (and I paraphrase): “If you are shot in the leg with an arrow, you don’t ask how the shaft was made, or where the feathers came from, or what its velocity was when leaving the string; when you are shot in the leg with an arrow, you pull the arrow out of your leg.”

A bit of a dodge, but more useful to be sure. And maybe more accurate. I read Eckhart Tolle recently who pointed out that Descartes had it wrong anyhow. We do not know we exist because we think; we know we exist because we are aware that we are thinking. There is a big difference. The former insinuates that we are our thoughts. The latter reminds us we are not.

All of this was running through me last night while watching The Amateurs. In this film, Jeff Bridges plays a down on his luck middle-aged man who decides to make an amateur porn movie. He wants success, you see. He’s lost his wife, he feels he’s losing his son, and all because he’s never had success.

When the movie opens we find Jeff Bridges sitting in a bar trying to think of an idea that will bring him success. Nothing is coming. He’s desperate. He’s broke. He’s out of work. His desperation grows and grows until he finally shouts, “THINK!”

It is appropriate that the idea he then thought of was a porn movie, because it is impossible to come up with a good idea merely by thinking. Thinking is how we arrange ideas, how we implement ideas – not how we come up with them. It made me sick to watch this scene. I felt as if I were in the throes of a hallucinogenic flashback. I was Jeff Bridges – or at least I had been too many times to count. How often had I tried to think my way out of despair, when it was thinking that got me there in first place? If there is a greater pain than this, than trying to solve the mystery of happiness with my brain, I have never felt it.

Fortunately the scene passed. Fortunately, I was soon back on my own couch with my wife and son. I took a deep breath, pulled the arrow out of my leg, and got back to the business of being alive.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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The Kids are All Right

Monday, February 27th, 2012

I moved in with my wife-to-be when I was twenty-five. She was an aspiring children’s book author and I was an aspiring grownup’s book author. At that time, I had come to the conclusion reached by many young men: that the world was a place of hard edges and steep drops, of uncertainty, and where success was just an urban term for survival—I wasn’t happy about this, but if a boy is to become a man, he must first be willing to see things as they are.

Which is to say, I wasn’t reading many children’s books. To do so would have been to remind myself of a time before I understood the world as it really was, a luxury I couldn’t afford. But I loved and trusted this woman I would soon have to marry if I wanted to keep being me. She had no hard edges or steep drops, and my love for her was quite certain, and my success was already achieved—and so it was one night I found myself reading A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh with her before bed.

I’m glad she reintroduced me to this book before we had children of our own and I would be required by the melting heart of fatherhood to embrace Little Bear, and Max and his Wild Things, and Grover, and even Barney. I’m glad I got to find some of these books again when I was still an angry young man. There is a uniquely tender kind of genius required to write what amounts to literature for children. Everything in the best adult fiction is in the best children’s fiction also, all the loss, and learning, and love. The child asks to be touched as deeply as the adult, as the soul has no height requirements. Yet what we don’t know often scares us, and there is so much nitty-gritty of the world children don’t yet know.

As I read about Pooh and Piglet and Rabbit and Eeyore I did not think about all the things I had learned recently that had been frightening me and which I was bearing as stoically as I could. I could not forget them, and they would frighten me again the next morning. But as with all art, Milne asked this question of me: If you feel better now here with me, why not tomorrow also? It would take me many, many years to answer, “No reason at all,” just about the time I was old enough I too could write for children if I wanted.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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A Meaningless World

Monday, February 13th, 2012

Let us say I decided to pull the giant plastic bin of Lego pieces out from under my son’s bed, and from that vast soup of variously shaped and colored plastic build a racecar. What would that racecar mean?

I would have to say the racecar itself would mean nothing. That is—the car has no inherent meaning. The only way for the car to have inherent meaning would be if every single person who beheld the car felt exactly the same about it, felt it was cool, or inspiring, or too red, or not red enough. But we know this is not the case.  We know that if we show this racecar to 100 people, we will get one hundred opinions on its value. Many of the opinions will be similar, but none will be exactly the same.

This is why everything, from the flowers to the moon to toy racecars, are meaningless—in and of themselves. They are inherently neutral, for only then can each of us find our own meaning in everything.

Nearly every time I feel the most crushing despair, it is because I have sought meaning outside of myself. It is as if I were asking a dictionary what I should write. All the words are there, after all. But the dictionary is waiting for me to decide. It does not care what I write. Those words may have definition, but their true meaning, for me, will only be found once I arrange them beside one another in a way that pleases me. Nothing means anything, which is the only way for us to create meaning in every decision we make.

Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing,” and so it does. Phillip Roth, who has written a lot, says he does not reread anything he has written. This makes sense to me. His pleasure, his meaning, will always be found in what he is doing now, not what he has already done.

And likewise, as we search the great soup of life for what to make next, we will draw from all that has been made—all the words invented, the shapes found, the colors mixed. From this great creative mass will come our own unique meaning and creation, creations we leave in turn for others to make meaning for themselves.

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No Reason

Monday, January 16th, 2012

I was not happy, or so I believed. It was another day off to the job that was not writing, which meant I was a not a success which meant I was not happy. Before I left for work that day my wife begged me to listen to a teacher she had recently discovered. I did not like to listen to her teachers; I did not care what they had to say, I cared about getting published. But on this day, I said, “Yeah, fine. As long as it’s short.”

Right away, I liked this woman. She was funny and she was talking about how human beings are creative and how this is what we do all the time, that this is what we were meant to do. Then she said something about happiness that I had never considered before. It was the exact opposite of what I had always believed, but she said it with such humor and matter-of-factness that I wondered if maybe it was true.

And as I drove to work, I thought about those times I felt happy. First I thought about winning races and wining awards. I thought about ovations and acceptance letters. The imagination is powerful. Think something and it is as if you are living it. Driving to work, I could feel that warm hum in my chest I would feel at the sound of applause, or when I wrote a great scene. I had always called that feeling happiness.

But didn’t I also feel it when I listened to “Hey Jude”? Couldn’t I sing “Hey Jude” right now and feel it just the same? Wasn’t it the same feeling as victory? And didn’t I feel it when I laughed at Seinfeld or read Dylan Thomas? And didn’t I also feel it the first time I met Jen? Wasn’t that the same feeling as what I called victory? Wasn’t that the same feeling I called success?

And then I arrived at work and parked my car and turned off the engine and sat there in the gathering darkness thinking about happiness and music and Jen. It was time to go to work, but I wasn’t ready to leave the car. I got very still and stopped thinking about anything, until I thought this: “And aren’t you feeling it right now, Bill? Aren’t you feeling it right now without any reason whatsoever?”

And work would never be the same after that.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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Tiger Moms Everywhere

Thursday, January 5th, 2012

I recently finished reading The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom in anticipation of my upcoming interview with its author, Amy Chua. This was one of the hardest books I have ever had to read. Not because I was raised by a Tiger Mom. Quite the opposite, really. To keep it in Eastern zoology, I would say mine was a Panda Mom. This was probably for the best. I didn’t need a Tiger Mom. I already had one living in my head.

I did not know I had one living in my head until I read Ms. Chua’s unsparing portrait of her parenting style and its eventual metamorphosis. Every criticism she leveled at her two daughters in the first two thirds of the book I had leveled at myself in the hopes of achieving the kind of success Ms. Chua expected for herself and her children. What’s more, the pitiless equation on which this parenting method is based—success = happiness—had secretly been mine as well. This equation worked for a time for me, until it completely and utterly did not.

Though I have spent many years pointing my intentional arrow away from that belief, the temptation to agree with the Tiger Mom work ethic remains great. The temptation to call trust laziness, freedom anarchy, and independence impudence was just a thought away. One moment I would be arguing with the Amy Chua character, and the next I would be loathing myself for having given up so quickly on the idea of constructive self-flagellation.

In the end, however, I concluded that, with respect to all Chinese mothers, the Tiger Mom is just afraid. Fear is powerfully attractive, but it will always run out. The energy of fear always runs out because this is energy gained by seeking the end of what you fear. If we believe in the power of fear, we must remain in fear in order to act. Using fear for action is founded in the belief that human beings would always rather do nothing than something, that humans would in fact be happier doing nothing than something. I am yet to meet one of these humans.

Love, on the other hand, never runs out because the energy of love is seeking to create more of itself. The energy of love propels us toward something and never away from it. And so writers tell other writers to write what they love; and so Joseph Campbell advises us to pursue our bliss; and so Mozart said that genius isn’t acumen or skill or craft, but love, love, love, love, love. I couldn’t agree more.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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Profit

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

To be upfront, I have spent little to no time in what could be called the traditional business world. I have never worked on a newspaper, say, or in an office of any kind. I have never climbed a corporate ladder or asked for a raise. This is not a source of pride but a point of reference for the story I am about to tell.

I recently had a conversation with a young man who works at a large corporation. The conversation was vaguely business related in that his corporation had indicated an interest in advertising on Author. The conversation we were having, however, was not about advertising. He wanted my opinion on something and I was giving it.

I like him, this young man. At least I think I do. You see, it’s hard to tell. While we talked, I felt as if I were looking at him in a kind of funhouse mirror. It was as if one moment he was there and the next he wasn’t. I didn’t understand what was happening until I saw that sometimes I was talking to him, and sometimes I was talking to The Corporation.

I did not enjoy talking to The Corporation. I did not know what to say to it. I didn’t know what it wanted. I know what people want: people want to connect to other people because connecting to other people feels good. We come up with all kinds of reasons why we connect – money, sex, protection – but really we do it only because it feels good. That’s reason enough.

It was an unsatisfying conversation in the end. I felt as if I had been on a date with a woman who would recoil every time I moved in to kiss her. But it was silly of me. Corporations don’t kiss anymore than they laugh or eat or kneel or pray or die. When I hear anyone saying that corporations are people I always think of that young man. Perhaps we wish sometimes that we were corporations. Perhaps it seems simpler than to be guided by something so profitless and fleeting as merely feeling good.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.

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