Dr. Philip Greenwood

When my younger daughter, Natalie was 3 we asked her at Thanksgiving, “What are you thankful for?” Her instant reply? “Lollipops!”

When you’re young happiness seems a little easier to come by. When I was 12 years old I stood in the chorus of the our school play, “You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown” singing “Happiness” wherein happiness is “Finding a pencil, pizza with sausage, telling the time…” As an adult happiness seems a lot less simple. There’s a recent emergence in the world of psychology of so-called “positive psychology.” The gist is this: traditional psychology focuses on making patients “not depressed,” “not anxious” or “not” any other number of emotional maladies. But not being depressed does not make you happy. It just sort of takes you to a “zero” point. In the words of the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, PhD, “Psychologists have mostly become victimologists and pathologizers.” To move beyond this we need something more.

Positive psychology suggests that there are three kinds of happy lives: the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life.

The pleasant life is a life of positive emotion and pleasure. The focus is on achieving as many pleasures as you can and savoring mindfulness to stretch to experiences over time and space. There are some drawbacks to the pleasant life. One, it’s not strongly heritable, meaning that pleasant experiences don’t really carry over strongly into other areas of life. The second drawback is that positive emotion habituates. I was having a frozen yogurt a few days ago and I noticed this exact thing. The first few bites were really delightful – a wonderful smooth, cool and creamy experience. But then I found myself just “getting through” the rest of it. I acclimated to the pleasantness of it pretty quickly. Pursuing “fun” as a way of pursuing happiness is fairly futile. Fun appears to have a square wave offset wherein the happiness drops off very quickly. A child may immensely enjoy going to Disneyland, but they have very little residual happiness from the experience 2 or 3 days afterward.

The good life is about engagement in life, about being in a state of flow or “in the zone.” It requires being in touch with your greatest personal strengths and crafting your life around these strengths as much as you can. We are experiencing the good life when we are engaged in activities that allow us to completely immerse ourselves.

The meaningful life is what Aristotle called eudaemonia or “happiness as the result of an active life governed by reason.” It’s being in the service of something larger than yourself.

It seems that each of these areas is important for achieving happiness. Happiness is not just positive emotion. It’s not just walking around with a grin on your face all the time. There must be engagement and meaning in life. In fact, pleasure makes a very small contribution to overall life happiness. Pleasure matters only if you have engagement and meaning. It’s the whipped cream and the cherry on top. But it’s not very deeply satisfying to just eat the whipped cream and cherry.

Strolling with my family down by the cove in La Jolla last weekend my family and I came across three guys practicing slacklining between two trees. I’ve seen this on television specials with people walking the line at insane heights over huge gorges in places like Yosemite. These guys were just doing 3 feet off the ground across about a 20 foot span so the risk was comparatively small. One guy just hopped right up on the line and walked back and forth, throwing in a spin here and there. I chatted with him for a bit about how hard this really is. He said he was trying for several days before he could just get both his feet on the thing.

I pride myself on catching on to physical challenges quickly so I watched for a bit and tried to intuit the skill set. This is something I do in martial art training all the time. I usually explain this by calling it vicarious learning where I don’t just observe what’s being shown, but try to tap directly into what the person is feeling internally which is the level at which their skill set has been embodied.

Then he invited me to give it a go. I started close to the end of the slackline near where it was attached to a tree. With one foot on the line and the other on the ground it was nearly impossible for me to keep the foot that was resting on the slackline from shaking all over the place like I was suddenly stricken with advanced Parkinson’s. I spent a minute wrestling with this only to realize that it was futile. Either I didn’t have the requisite muscle control in my leg or I was going about this wrong. Like riding a bike, I posited in my mind, it’s harder to go slow and half-step it than to just jump right in.

I took a breath and mustered up a dose of courage with the realization that a full commitment could result in A) flipping upside down onto my head B) having my feet slip off the line on either side, dropping with my full weight onto the line with the line snapping mercilessly upward into my nether regions or C) successfully mounting the line, but without a clear exit strategy. I also realized that the longer I wait the more flaccid my courage would become. I remember bungee jumping 160 feet off a bridge in Whistler a few years ago and the lady before me clung white-knuckled to the railing amidst tears and screams for several minutes before finally losing her grip and falling in what was the closest re-enactment of a suicide attempt I’ve ever witnessed first hand.

No more hesitation. With dozens of people standing around and watching I placed my left foot onto the line and before it had a chance to start shaking again I propelled myself upward with my second foot onto the line and instantly proceeded to option (B) above, smacking the inside of my right thigh on the slackline which smote me just a couple of inches from a precious part of my personal real estate, and I fell to the ground on my side.

There I lay on the ground, not injured, but in the midst of a great (but not altogether rare) opportunity to overcome what is possibly the greatest human fear – not falling or even being burned alive – but public humiliation. It was some consolation that the first discernible words that penetrated the groans of the onlookers were my new found mentor, “Dude, that was awesome. You were almost up!” This is definitely one of those activities that “almost” doesn’t carry much consolation. But hey, I’m shopping slackline kits right now at rei.com. Call me crazy, but I think this could be really fun!

I was woke up early one morning not too long ago and heard Olivia, my 8-year-old daughter, quietly crying in her room. I went in to see what was wrong and, through her little sobs, she said, “I had a dream.” I asked her, “Was it a scary dream?” And she answered, “No, I dreamed I could fly.” “Well that actually sounds pretty fun” I replied. To which she said (between sobs), “No, because when I woke up I was jumping on the bed and it didn’t work!”

We’ve all heard the advice to follow your dreams. But somewhere along the way most people have stopped following their dreams because when they got up the next morning they jumped on the bed and came right back to earth. Olivia had no idea how close her dreams were to becoming reality. She had a vision, but she didn’t have the right plan. Just jumping on the bed was just wishful thinking. But two other ingredients made her dream come true. One is knowing the right person – in this case here daddy – to help her. Relationships in life are absolutely essential for all success. Sometimes you’ve got to do it on your own, but you can’t do it alone. And two – she needed access to the right knowledge or technology. So on the afternoon of her 9th birthday I took her for a drive during which I continually hedged on her question of, “Where are we going?”

As we pulled up to the Indoor Skydiving facility in Perris, CA she got really excited and needless to say, after a very short learning curve, we both had an awesome time. In fact, I think I got the best thanks a dad could ever get after we were finished when Olivia said, “This is the best day of my life!… Can we do this every month?” (That’s Olivia and me in the pics above).

Have dreams and pursue those dreams. People don’t usually reach the end of their life and say, “I’m sure glad I played it safe. Now I can die in peace.” More often they say, “I wish I would have taken more chances. I wish I would have followed my passion!” Whatever it is, the knowledge is out there. And there is someone out there, even if it isn’t your daddy, that can help you get there.

I don’t often get to go to my 9-year-old daughter’s ballet class with her. I’m usually in the office at that time. But last week I was able to go. When I got there, in a room full of chittering girls, she said, “Come dance with us daddy!” And her teacher quickly chimed in “Yes, join us!”

Sometimes the distance from a normal life to an extraordinary one is just a few steps. “Normal” would be to nervously chuckle in response to the invitation and find a chair on the side with the other parents only to vicariously experience my child’s nimble strides and perhaps indulge a private conceit that she is the best one of them all.

But this day I didn’t choose “normal.” Feeling like a lost elephant traipsing among graceful gazelles I made my way through classical foot positions, pliés and relevés and jetés across the broad wooden floor. In minutes I was so focused on the teacher and the practice that I forgot I wasn’t just a normal part of the class, except for the occasional glimpse I caught of some middle-age balding guy in the mirror.

The little encouragement we all got (hopefully) from our mother when she told us “You can be anything you want to be” comes with an expiration date. When my next birthday comes I’ll cross the half-century mark with the realization that there are a lot of things I might have been; Olympic athlete, a rock star or maybe even a ballet dancer. But from this point in my life it looks unlikely.

At the ballet class a mother sitting with her boys while they watched their sister dance commented to her sons, “Do you think your father would ever do that?” to which they responded, “No way!” Kind of sad actually. We each have such a short time to live that a denial of the richness of any experience is nearly a denial of life itself. We have all live in “virtuality” to some degree. The constant media immersion makes us sometimes forget the difference between a real life and a vicarious life. We risk becoming so used to watching life that we forget to actually experience it. As Lee Ann Womack so beautifully wrote, “And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance… I hope you dance”

Yes, my thighs and feet were sore the next day, but a happy kind of sore.

We have all experienced or know someone who has experience significant loss. Especially lately. When we lose big stuff in our life – job, money, house – we often end up asking ourselves “Who am I?” We invariably grow to identify our “self” with our accomplishments and possessions and when we lose them we can experience some form of disorientation. It’s hard to not associate “net worth” with “self worth.” But as we move beyond the initial stress of loss we enter a period of inventorying our personal resources and re-assessing our own value.

When things are going well we don’t often ask ourselves the important questions – and there are many. But one question you should definitely consider asking yourself (and repeatedly throughout your life) is “Who am I?”

We all have many roles in your life – father, mother, son, boss, employee, teacher, friend – so we’re actually many things. But the question we’re really trying to answer is “What is my unique value?” This is not a question that you can answer in one sitting, but I’m going to offer up one possible starting place.

I started my young academic career with my sight set on composing film scores. While this is not the ultimate direction my life took, I’ve always maintained my interest and passion for music. Not long ago I watched a television special with the great American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. As he discussed his work as a composer he went to the piano and plunked a single note. “A single note doesn’t say anything,” he said, “but when we follow it with a second note we’re creating a phrase and from that we can begin to derive meaning.”

As we attempt to answer the question “What is my unique value?” we need at least two (or more) notes. Once we have these notes it’s the intersection of the notes that begin to expresses your unique song. For example you might say that you enjoy cooking. You might then say that you have a passion for the outdoors and hiking and camping. You also might have some experience in teaching. A lot of people enjoy cooking. And a lot of people enjoy the outdoors. There are also a lot of people who are teachers of various sort. But there are far, far fewer people who represent the convergence of cooking, a passion for the outdoors and teaching skills.

Each of these individual interests, talents and experiences on their own are merely notes. But combined they form your song. The person in our example may be uniquely qualified for and passionate about writing a book, starting a website and teaching and lecturing on outdoor cooking. Nowadays when people are looking for less expensive ways to have fun this has a very large potential audience as well!

Is there a lot of sweat and work to live your dreams? Of course. But the good news is that when you’re passionate about something it doesn’t seem like work. Retirement isn’t even a question because it’s doing something you would never even consider retiring from.

Try taking an inventory of things you are passionate about, things you enjoy and valuable experiences you have had in your life. Where these things converge you may just begin to appreciate the unique lens through which only you can show us the world.