A Painful Beauty

I found myself this week wrapping a few Christmas gifts while listening to news of the impeachment of Donald Trump. I was struck by the incongruity involved and also aware of the absurdity of those defending the indefensible corruption of the president.  Several Republicans referred to his actions as "inappropriate," an absurdly euphemistic term that obscures what should be called wrong, immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional.

The larger issue is how to balance the horrors of reality, and history, with the joy promised by the coming season of light and hope. Or, on a daily basis, how to find meaning in what to many writers seems a bleak existence.

As a former student wrote to me, the serious literature we read (and much of our escapist fiction and film) remind us of human greed, selfishness, and violence. It so easy for readers to be as pessimistic about life as so many writers are. How do we find what music and art often give us (but literature often does not): a sense of being lifted up, a sense that life is worth living?  It seems to me we must place the mind's bleak view of life as empty and meaningless in a much larger package.

As a Christian, I must be optimistic; I must remind myself that God is present in me, in those I encounter, and in the natural world. I must make an effort, even amid my pain and fatigue, to find something to be grateful for, even a simple thing like a blue sky on a beautiful, crisp winter day.  I must make an effort of the will to counter what I know to be the lot of many of my friends: pain, despair, suffering, and loneliness.   And in the wider world, violence and corruption.

I must turn inward to prayer.  I ask for the wisdom to accept my fate, without blaming myself or God or anyone else for my age and physical weakness. I picture others in their suffering and connect myself with them.  And I remind myself that the light of love and compassion invariably comes after we journey through the valley of darkness and pain. Life is a balance between light and dark, and it is a very delicate balance.

I think of the words of Pascal:  "Man is equally capable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."

Happiness is the product of going beyond the mind into the soul and the heart.

As Richard Rohr has said, peace of mind is a contradiction in terms.  We can never find peace by analyzing, judging, and criticizing ourselves and others; we have to move beyond thinking into the realm of feeling and believing in something greater than our own selves.

It is a great challenge to be in awe of nature, to experience wonder and joy while the world around you seems to be pursuing self-serving ends. It is a challenge to be grateful when you feel sick or alone.  It is hard to be patient with the painful beauty that life is--to see amid the pain the light of beauty.

I would like to think that everyone who says Happy Holidays at this time of year truly wishes each other inner peace and a contentment that comes from accepting both the pain and the beauty of life.

Gratitude and Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving in the U.S. tomorrow, a day of eating, connecting with family and friends, and, presumably, being grateful. I suspect that, at least among the people I know, gratitude is mostly a vague, generalized awareness, mainly that the busy holiday season is upon us.  This holiday for many people means an annual ritual of travel, cooking, watching football, overeating and shopping--and nothing more. 

I wish everyone could be silent for a while on this day, savor the moment, and truly feel thankful, especially for the things we take for granted.  Isn't happiness found in being mindful of the present?

Being grateful is essential to my life because, amid personal struggles, political turmoil, and world-wide violence and corruption, I need to stop and think positive thoughts.  I need to remind myself of simple things--the intense blue of the sky between two pine trees as I look out my window, or the light as it comes into the house in the afternoon...I am grateful for the beautiful lakes that dot my area of Florida and the touches of autumn in colored leaves on cool days.

I am grateful for the friends and family who write or call us at this time of year.  I am grateful for those times in the day when I don't feel the pain of arthritis and become irritable or sad about my health.  Of course, I am grateful for a rich store of memories--of students going back 50-plus years, of trips, of family gatherings by many who are no longer around.  Above all, I am grateful for my wife, Lynn, and her brilliance, her hard work, her constant support and boundless love.

I am grateful to have had a retirement from university teaching that has allowed me to write and speak and keep learning new things, thanks to the internet and related technology.  And I am grateful for so much more....

Gratitude is for me the essence of prayer, and I like to think that in each moment when I recollect something to be thankful for, at any time of the year, I am talking to God, connecting myself to my inner life as well as to the community of people I know and remember. It's hard to imagine real gratitude without a belief in God.

And it's hard to imagine happiness without gratitude.

How Bad is Boredom?

Many of the heavyweights who have written knowledgably about boredom have seen it as negative, perhaps akin to depression, certainly related to the inevitable restlessness we all experience. I have written about it as a fear of running out of things to do.

Andreas Elpidorou, writing in Aeon, suggests the positive benefits of boredom: it alerts us to the need to be creative, to break out of the unfulfilling activity we are engaged in.

First, he says, not everyone who experiences boredom, which is to say nearly everyone at some time, is prone to ongoing boredom, a more serious issue (depression, I assume, though he doesn't use that word). If a sensation of pain alerts us to a problem in our bodies, then the feeling of boredom is a signal that we are pursuing the wrong thing for us spiritually; we are being prompted to find something else to do.

In a popular culture where distractions abound, that should not be hard. In fact, the culture of 24/7 entertainment functions as a kind of narcotic, writes Ron Rolheiser.  Of course, as he points out, we often need a palliative from pain, so we turn to music or movies or games to protect us from feeling hurt. But, Rolheiser says, too often this narcotic becomes a way of escaping the reality of our inner lives.

In a world of instant communication, in cities where restaurants and clubs are open around the clock to please us, we can be amused, distracted, and catered to any time of the day or night.  Our TVs contain hundreds of channels, and iPods give us access to vast libraries of music. But are we happy?  Do we not still remain bored, restless?

Some say our popular culture is giving us a permanent attention deficit disorder: we pay attention to so many things that we aren't giving real attention to anything that matters.  We are so busy being distracted that we seldom find opportunities to feel deeply our connection with others.

It takes a serious illness or death in the family sometimes for some people to start paying attention to what's going on inside them, to reflect on the meaning of life. All the stimulation and entertainment in the world can't help us live in peace with ourselves and those who love us.

In other words, the soul needs attention. As Rumi wrote, we rush from room to room desperately searching for the necklace that's around our neck.

So when I feel restless or bored with the same routine of humdrum activities, I must remind myself that, instead of turning to the media, I can turn inward.  I can find within myself, through solitude and silence, an essential link to what some call God, others call the essential reality of the now.

Happiness as Freedom

Reading recently about the tormented life of T. S. Eliot, who was often paralyzed by fears of various kinds, has made me realize again the importance of living and trusting fully in the present moment.

And of being grateful, each day, for the good things around us as we try to free ourselves from self-preoccupation. For me, this is a daily struggle since my own physical problems send up alarm signals about my life in the future: how will I be six months from now, a year from now?  What will I do about X?

Realizing the good things that are around us seems to be part of statement I recently found by Seth Goldman, CEO of Beyond Meat, an ecologically friendly company:   "There's a easy formula for happiness. It's when what you have is greater than what you want.  Most people would say the way to be happy is to have more. I say the way to be happy is to want less."

It's interesting that a relatively young entrepreneur would take the "less is more" philosophy of Thoreau and E F. Schumacher, author of 'Small is Beautiful.'   Happiness is not all about acquiring more and more; it is, as Richard Rohr has said, realizing that life is not all about me. He would go beyond Goldman's notion, which seems limited to money and material things.

"You can have political and economic freedom, but if you are not free from your own ego, from your own centrality inside your own thinking, I don't think you are very free at all. In fact, your actions and behavior will be totally predictable. Everything will revolve around your security, survival, self-preservation. . . ."  In other words, around yourself (Rohr).

This self Rohr speaks of is what Thomas Merton called the false self: the public face we present to the world ("the face to meet the faces that you meet," as Eliot's Prufrock says).  The false self is mainly a creation of our own mind and so is an illusion; it is that part of us that feels offended, critical, agitated or worried about what others will think and how we will be judged. The false self needs approval.

Happiness, we might say, is the freedom from this false self, from self-preoccupation. It is by staying fully in the present moment that we can let go of the ego and prevent our emotions and obsessive thoughts from controlling us.

Looking out the window

I wasn't eager to see a movie about Mother Teresa, whom I admired greatly, but I joined my wife in viewing "The Letters" last night and came away impressed.  It was not a piously sentimental story of a saint.

The 2014 movie was not a critical success, and I can see why: the title is misleading. We don't see the anguish felt in the many letters Mother Teresa wrote, including her sense of hopelessness and depression.

But writer-director William Reiad has chosen to give us the full story of the woman's spiritual growth from 1946 on. As admirably depicted by Juliet Stevenson, the saint of Calcutta has been teaching in India at a convent school for privileged girls. Looking out the window each day, she is bothered by the poor and hungry who are there and feels driven to move out of the cloister to help them.  She cannot ignore them.

Although many might agree with the Mother Superior, who asks skeptically, "how can you hope to make a difference amid such vast suffering?", Sister Teresa forges on to offer loving care to one dying person at a time among the poorest of the poor.  For me, this change of heart, from being happy as a teacher to leaving her profession for something wholly new and risky, was memorable.

It led me to think, why don't more people volunteer to work for justice and peace in this world?  Is it a sense of being overwhelmed by the enormity of world poverty and hunger, by the refugee crisis in Europe, among other horrors?  Is it selfishness or perhaps the inability to imagine thinking outside the box?

Richard Rohr, in today's comment from the Center for Action and Contemplation, suggests another answer: that we easily fall into a kind of postmodern fatalism that leads us to retreat into our safe enclosures, where we try to remain. He refers to it as "the Late Great Planet Earth" view of history. Everything seems hopeless, and we easily believe that anything we do won't really matter.

How can people, especially believers, be happy or hopeful in such a culture?  Negative thinking, Rohr says, is a great danger and has helped create a cynical, aimless, and futile lifestyle even among those who are otherwise good and sincere.

Very few are called, like Mother Teresa, to undertake missions to the poorest of the poor. But anyone with imagination can look out the window and see that there are needs all around us: lonely people who need attention, infirm neighbors who need help, poor people who need a dose of love.

It's so easy to be cynical in this world; it's more challenging to be positive.

Being Dissatisfied is Good?

In a recent article, Eddie Siebert, S.J. tells the story of an 82-year-old doctor he knew, a man who had practiced medicine for over fifty years but confessed to never really liking medicine.  So why did he become a doctor?  His parents wanted it. He really wanted to write. Sound familiar?

Of course, he could have done both, as William Carlos Williams did, as Walker Percy did, among others in a line going back to Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century. But that is not the point.

The point of the article is to look at our basic human restlessness and dissatisfaction and see what value they might have. No matter how great a job or home or family or whatever we have, we invariably find something to complain about, some fault to find. We find a certain pleasure, even happiness, in being dissatisfied, knowing that "it could be better" somewhere else or with someone else. The striving is all.

The Boston College theologian Michael Himes, quoted by Siebert, says that dissatisfaction is a good thing. Why?  Well, it "moves us forward, makes us try new things, and deepens our perceptions about the world and ourselves. . . .That restlessness we all feel is a good thing and gets us closer to becoming the person we've always been."

So we realize our full selfhood or potential or identity as persons in striving for joy, even while unconsciously realizing how elusive joy is.

I was reminded of a recent biography I have been reading of Winston Churchill. I was struck by the anxious drive of the young Winston, his burning ambition to fulfill what he saw, grandly, as his destiny. And although he made many enemies in the process of achieving greatness as a leader, he certainly fulfilled his earthly destiny as a leading statesman of the 20th century. His life story reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt's, among many others: men driven by dissatisfaction to overcome handicaps and become the person they have always been.

The great tragedy in many people's lives is that they realize, too late, that they have lived the wrong life, never achieving much happiness.  When Ivan Ilych, in Tolstoi's great story, has such a realization on his death bed, he also comes to an enlightened insight that it is still not too late to make a change: he feels a sense of love, which gives his life purpose and meaning.  Until then, Ivan Ilych had lived a smugly satisfied life; he finally found the wisdom in being dissatisfied at the end, as his soul comes alive.

Happy are those who find joy in their dissatisfaction before it's too late.

Fear, trust, and happiness

I am something of a sucker for new books dealing with happiness and inner peace, especially when they present the findings of neuroscientists about how the brain works.

And so I had to bring home from the library "Hardwiring Happiness" by Rick Hanson, who says that we must learn to take in the good things around us because we are hardwired to recall what is dangerous: evolution apparently turned the brain into "Velcro for the negative but Teflon for the positive."  So it is easier to mull and review past and present hurt feelings while letting positive, even joyful, experiences pass us by.

Hanson presumably shows (I have only skimmed the opening so far) that we can change the brain itself by positive thinking: sound familiar?

Another book I glanced at is "The Truth about Trust" by David DeSteno, another psychologist headed for the best-seller list. He focuses on a topic little studied: the fact that a great deal of our mental energies are expended in determining who and what to trust. The mind, he says, is constantly trying to figure out how reliable other people are as well as the need to be trustworthy. Much of this is unconscious, such as the daily encounter with uncertainty and risk-taking, so essential to any creative process.

DeSteno does not seem to emphasize fear, yet the way trust relates to our relationship with ourselves brings up the topic of anxiety, in particular a revealing article in The New Yorker by Louis Menand: "The Prisoner of Stress" (What does anxiety mean?).  The article is essentially a review of the book by Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety, which I read and commented on earlier.

Menand's take on the complexities of crippling fear is that it is an illness without a cure, not a problem to solve despite the years and years of time and money Stossel and people like him have spent on various psychological approaches and medications.  Why some people seem to be fearless and others panic remains a mystery.

Are people who can speak easily in public born lucky?  Consider the comforting (to anxious people like me) reality of those celebrities who have been tormented by social anxiety, from Charles Darwin to Laurence Olivier and Hugh Grant; the latter two, like Barbra Streisand, seem to have experienced stage fright after they became stars, that is, when they were aware of being judged by a critical public whose image of them was different from the very human reality.

The more talented and creative we are, the more anxious?  Perhaps.  We can imagine the worst with a vivid intensity that paralyzes us.

Basketball legend Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics vomited before every game. So, apparently, did the brilliant and handsome operatic tenor Franco Corelli.  One might think these accomplished, brilliant performers would have nothing to fear, but reason and fear have little to do with each other.

However beneficial anxiety may be, like primal fear as a means of self-protection, it can wreak havoc on the mind and body, as Stossel indicates. How it works remains unclear.

Many things can help, but we are left in the end to deal with the mystery of the mind and of the panic button in the brain that registers alarm, requiring us, day by day, to counteract this as best we can with memories and experiences of beauty, love, and happiness.

And so the struggle with the mystery of who we are goes on.

Who are we? (Part II)

I want to follow up with a brief addition to my last post (May 26) in which I tried once again to raise an impossible question, this time about the mystery of the self in a lengthy, meandering essay.

What I neglected to ask is: Who am I talking to when I talk to myself?  Many others must have thought of this basic question, and thinkers in various disciplines have given many answers. It seems to me that the restless, developing part of the self talks to and questions the more permanent self.

Perhaps some of the comments of film director-producer Joss Whedon at the recent Wesleyan University commencement would shed some light on this topic from a totally different perspective.  I summarize what I read on the Internet.

Identity is something you are constantly learning, Whedon told the graduates, because it is always an area of tension and ambiguity. There is always an element of dissent in each of us; so, he said, you must be active in "understanding yourself so you can become yourself."

"If you think happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of that part of you that can never be at peace." If you accept this element of conflict at the heart of our self-understanding, things get a lot better.

An uncommonly intelligent commencement address. Whedon does not raise the issue of the true self or permanent identity, as I was trying to do, but captures the essential element of restlessness at the center of our beings. That center can be imaged as a many-faceted "immortal diamond," in the phrase used by G. M. Hopkins.

The Sound of Laughter

One of the great joys of my life has come to be the sound of a group of people laughing.  To know that I have been the immediate cause of their temporary happiness is gratifying, almost ego-enhancing.

In recent years, with a university colleague, I have put together two one-hour programs, "Historical Humor and Wit" and "Fractured English."  The material is taken from what people (writers, public figures, students, others) have actually said or written, so I can only claim the originality of creating the package.

Looking at historical figures (Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Churchill, et al.) as funny or witty men humanizes them, brings them down to our level, and makes history a human story rather than a mere succession of events, mostly horrible. Our audiences eat it up, learning a bit while also laughing a lot.

I often begin with what Charlie Chaplin said: "A day without laughter is a day wasted." Yet many go without laughing, and, sadly, without the psycho-physical release of tension involved, for long periods. It's no wonder we have the Comics page, the emailed jokes, the cartoons, and TV comics.  Men, more than women, tend to bond over jokes, even silly ones involving puns. Both men and women seem to use the silliness of cat videos and anything cat-related to provoke a smile or a laugh. I join right in; many people are too serious, even solemn, afraid to smile let alone laugh.

Comedy allows us to step back and take in the whole picture of life at a given moment; in our detachment, we find amusement, perhaps at human folly. 

The German poet Schiller said, we are fully human and alive when we play. And laughter is at the heart of play, and of that elusive thing called happiness.  I like to think of laughter as a type of prayer, an affirmation of life and its essential goodness.

Does Happiness Exist?

One thing can be said about all the studies of happiness, which have grown exponentially since 2000, is that the topic is highly subjective and complex. So as I send friends and family members cards and messages with wishes for Happy Holidays, my mind returns to this elusive subject, which for many has economic implications.

The feeling of well-being often relates to being well-off, or so the economic studies indicate: people who say they are happy tend to be financially secure, healthy, married, religious, and engaged in purposeful work.

Yet no matter how healthy, wealthy or wise we are, we are also, inevitably, aware of evil in the world: who is untouched by disease, pain, injustice and loss?  It is this awareness of evil that leads the political philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (who died three years ago) to question whether happiness exists.

Like every thinker, he raises important (often unanswerable) questions: does a person in the state of Nirvana, which seems to involve the happiness of self-detachment, have an awareness of the world? If not, what kind of reality is he part of?  If he or she is aware of the human life-world, he must also be aware of suffering and evil. "Is it possible to be aware of evil and suffering and still be perfectly happy?" (A singular question.)

The article from which I quote in the Dec. 20 issue of The New York Review of Books is entitled, 'Is God Happy?'  After all, to consider a Nirvana-like state is to imagine, in the West, what the souls in heaven presumably experience.  Are they aware of our lives on earth, as most Christians believe? And if they are, how can they be happy in their eternal state, knowing about our unhappiness?

If God is perfectly immutable, He cannot be upset by the misery of those on earth, so He is indifferent; but He is called a loving father (by Christians), so He cannot be indifferent. So, of course, we cannot understand the divine, and all Kolakowski can finally say is "God is not happy in any sense we can understand."

He concludes that happiness is not applicable to God nor to human beings--happiness defined as an ongoing condition of serenity and well-being. This, he says, can only be imagined, not experienced.

So the message here is not too cheery this holiday season. The only way to be happy is to be unaware of the misery in the world. I could live a contemplative life as a monk or hermit and tune out the world, but wouldn't I still be restless and unhappy much of the time?  Mystics seem to experience prolonged states of bliss before they are returned to ordinary reality.

I suppose we must be grateful for what Wordsworth called "spots of time" in which we feel temporarily uplifted out of ourselves; but these experiences of timeless bliss occur mainly in early childhood.  Adults can be happy by experiencing moments of wonder and pleasure, and as long as we love others, we can feel satisfied much of the time--if we don't think too deeply or read the daily news.

If our Polish philosopher is right, the idea of happiness as an immutable condition is beyond us. So what it is that we seek--and wish each other when we say Happy New Year or Merry Christmas?  A brief respite of good fortune amid life's turmoil?  Pleasure? Prosperity? No one knows what happiness really is.

Presumably Thomas Jefferson had prosperity in mind in his famous phrase "the pursuit of happiness." The history of happiness shows that in earlier times, happiness went along with luck. The Greeks said that no man can be judged happy until he is dead (only then it is clear he has been fortunate).  Today we tend to define happiness as personal well-being.  We never think of earthly happiness as enduring, do we?

Happiness may be indefinable and subjective; yet questioning the very thing we desire and pursue makes sense. In general, raising questions can be more important than providing answers. "Never forget," wrote Kolakowski in another piece of work, "that there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science and are crucially important to the survival of humanity as we know it."

In this season devoted to wonder, I am happy to say that my life has generally been happy: I know and have known love. Love exists, if happiness eludes us. This--and the peace that comes from loving and being loved--is what I wish for others now and in the new year.

Needs and Wants

While cleaning out our house of the countless things we do not want and probably never needed, like towels embroidered with dancing cats, coffee mugs printed with witty sayings, and other non-essentials (motivated by our church's annual rummage sale for the benefit of Haiti), I happened to see a blog by Matthew Boudway, "How Much is Enough?"

And I began to think about the argument he outlines from a new book by R. and E. Skidelsky, How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life. Their thesis seems to be important and controversial, certainly among Romneyites: that in most parts of the developed world, the basis for a good life already exists and that the endless pursuit of economic growth puts the good life, however defined, forever out of reach because we are constantly striving for more.

Is there no end to the constant pursuit of more wealth? A radical question. I think of the multi-million dollar annual salaries of Wall Street bankers and other CEOs; I think of the insatiability built into our modern economy whereby what we have is never enough since stores keep luring us to want more. And so we buy more. We are constantly been pressured to want more and more, and the person who has only one TV or computer or car, who lives a life without toxic acquisitiveness, is thought odd.

The authors use Aristotle, Keynes, and many others to develop their ethical approach to capitalism. J. M. Keynes, who in the thirties, predicted that per capita income would make working almost obsolete in a hundred years, has been proved wrong. It is taken for granted today in the first world, at least, that the pursuit of wealth is good, necessary, and an end in itself. It is assumed that such a pursuit has to do with happiness. Faust, in the legendary story, assumed that the total satisfaction of his every desire was worth the loss of his soul. He lost his deal with the devil.

The Skidelskys suggest that we need a corrective to modern economics, a shared understanding of what wealth is for--as well as agreement about what the good life means. If I compare the restless energy with which most Americans are always trying to satisfy their wants, not just their needs, with those in Haiti who will benefit from this month's rummage sale of our cast-off surplus items, I wonder which group has greater inner peace and contentment.

Are we not capable of controlling our insatiable needs for more gadgets? Do we need seven kinds of cereal in a household of four people? Do we need all those vacations, or are we so worn out from working to gain more income to pay for all the stuff we don't really need that getting away is the only thing that will give us peace of mind?

I look forward to reading the book since it promises from the reviews to raise important questions about our economy that we seldom ask: Is it the goal of modern life to satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort, as a classic economic theorist once said? Does a successful life mean merely an active, productive life, one that produces profit? If so, what about leisure and contemplation?

The questions raised here deal with so much that is basic, including how we define happiness, what a just society looks like vs. individual acquisition, and why we don't chose to limit our wants to our needs. Maybe we already have what we need but are not using it very well. Is endless growth and acquisition, rather than redistribution to those with real needs, the path we want to stay on?

I doubt if anyone running for office in this election year will raise such unpopular questions.

The Science of Laughter

My interest in happiness studies, and comedy, includes a curiosity about laughter. We all know it's healthy and relaxing to laugh, and that we adults don't do enough of it. A friend of mine is a humor therapist who says we should laugh even if something isn't funny: the stomach doesn't know the difference.

Whether we can enjoy a good belly laugh alone, with no incentive, is debatable. This is the area of study undetaken by Robert Provine, who has been recording human laughter for years. This comes from a piece in Mental Floss by Judy Dutton.

Provine finds that babies laugh about 300 times a day whereas adults on 20 times. His theory is that, as we grow up, it's not just humor that's involved but bonding: laughter is a social lubricant. No wonder we tend to laugh 30 times more often in the presence of others than when alone. (Consider the canned laughter on TV.)

Laughter is really contagious, he finds: hearing a laugh activates the brain's premotor cortex, preparing the face muscles to smile and laugh in return. Provine is a scientist who approaches his subject with academic seriousness.

Although scornful laughter can be harmful, most laughter, even if humor is not directly involved, is a natural bodily function. And we don't do enough of it: so much for the science of laughter.

Isn't there more to it? My question, to which I have no immediate answer, is: does laughter cause happiness or come from happiness, or is happiness irrelevant? Is laughing really contagious, or does one have to be in a relaxed, receptive (happy) state of mind before joining with others in laughing?

It's one of those seemingly simple, basic human activities that is anything but simple. It seems to me that the mind perceives a sense of the absurd or incongruous and the body responds. But then I am talking about comedy, not laughter in isolation.

I would welcome responses from readers: schiffhorst@yahoo.com. Thanks.

What Does Happiness Look Like?

If you want to see what a happy man looks like, see the documentary "Bill Cunningham New York" (2010), which we watched with great delight last night (courtesy of Netflix).

Bill, a fashion photographer for the New York Times, has bicycled around the streets of Manhattan for 40 years taking pictures of interestingly-dressed people, mainly women. His work is seen in the weekend editions of the Times. He also catches celebrities at the charity events covered by the Times.

He does all this, at age 80, with Franciscan simplicity. "Money," he says, "is cheap." He wants and has found something more importrant and hard to find: freedom. Freedom to search for beauty. He does this every day with great passion.

He has always found beauty and pleasure in the way people dress themselves. And although he hobnobs with the rich and famous, he lives in a tiny studio apartment, alone, with bath down the hall, without a TV and with files everywhere around him stuffed with pictures he has made recording New Yorkers on the streets in their finery. Bill himself dresses in a patched poncho and simple blue jacket. He eats sparingly and doesn't want honors. He says he is embarrassed by displays of wealth.

To live simply and honestly in such a world is a heroic endeavor, but Bill Cunningham, with his disarming charm, is the last person to see himself as special, much less heroic.

He laughs and talks a lot but when asked why he attends church weekly, and what his Catholic faith means to him, he is stymied. He is not one to explore the inner life. If anyone can be said to lack a private life, Bill is that person.

He has lived for his work, and in this--and the people he encounters--he has found life-long happiness.

I am reminded of what the Dalai Lama said: "In order to be happy, one must first possess inner contentment; and inner contentment cannot come from having all we want; rather it comes from having and appreciating all we have."

Choices

Not feeling in top form yesterday after a minor accident and visit to a doctor, followed by a look at the news with its economic and political horrors, I needed to relax with an uplifting movie. Instead, we opened our cheerful red envelope from Netflix and watched Mike Leigh's Another Year.

I guess it sounded promising when we ordered it, and it was well acted and intelligently conceived. But this close-up of a group of Londoners, most of them in despair over their lives, is almost unendurable, especially the non-stop talk of Mary (Leslie Manville), a lush who visits the main characters, played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, who have more patience with such people than I would have. And Ruth, playing a mental health counselor, should know how to deal with friends like Mary instead of pouring more drinks for them.

She could also tell Leigh that his film should be edited--unless you like to watch four seasons pass with nothing but talk, all going nowhere, with little to uplift the spirit. He seems to want to give us portraits of suffering souls, as if channeling the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" ("Ah, look at all the lonely people") and applying it to contemporary British life, with its many disappointments, especially to the late middle-aged failures.

Here everyone is unhappy in his or her own way. Soon, one of the characters says, we will be history, part of the past. Death is the inevitable end, and we must endure day by day.

I wish one of the clever English screen adapters like Andrew Davies would adapt one of David Lodge's novels. I've just finished "Therapy," his whimsical study of a middle-aged man in search of fulfillment; it would make a great movie. It would help us laugh at ourselves instead of reach for another drink.

I know that my life is circumscribed by problems, most of them beyond my control, but I make an effort to make each day, however hum-drum it may be, unique and special. Today, I enjoyed seeing the smiles of the clerks at the local supermarket, many of whom recognize me, one of whom tells me jokes (even though she is crippled and has a lot to complain about but never does).

I enjoyed the music I heard during my lunch, enjoyed watching the cat do nothing with her usual grace and with rapt attention to every sound.

Watching her is invariably amusing and can be one of the little things I do to make a quiet day spent at home recuperating filled with moments I can enjoy and be grateful for. I don't know how many more days I will have on earth, but I am determined to make each one mindful and rich and worth living.

I can choose this prayerful approach, or I can be pulled down by my problems and by the state of the economy, by the injustice of the world. I can also choose my evening's entertainment more carefully.

Yet even Mike Leigh's movie may not have been a disastrous choice after all; it has prompted a few thoughts about happiness and why our lives are often so bereft of meaning. And it has given me something to write about, stimulating my brain and perhaps prompting a thought or two in one of my readers. (I remain surprised, and grateful, to learn how many there are!)

On Being Perfect

Like several of my friends, I have always striven for perfection and thought that the term "perfectionist" was a compliment. In recent years, I have learned the folly of this approach to life.

To be the best I can be in everything I do, from teaching and writing to husbanding, is different from the futile quest for perfection. In my twenties, I tried to look perfect, combing my hair with great precision so that every strand was in place, making sure my tie was just right, that I said the right thing at parties, and all the rest.

With the passage of time, I have thawed out: I was once frozen in a steretype of perfectionism that would have driven me crazy, had I continued to pursue that path. I have a neighbor who freaks out if a leaf or smudge mars his perfectly waxed car. This is borderline madness. I have seen parents push their kids to get nothing but A's on their report card, who settle for nothing less than first place in any competition. What does such pressure do to these kids growing up?

Be the best you can be, I want to tell them, without going to extremes. After all, nothing is life is perfect. We have to accept unfinished symphonies as part of human existence, as Karl Rahner once said. Happiness is always limited.

Ron Rolheiser has written widely (and well) on this topic: we tend to romanticize happiness, thinking of it, searching for it as the lack of tension and the ultimate in pleasure. But disappointments and frustrations are always near, ready to intrude on this impossible ideal.

What we should seek, says Rolheiser, is meaning, not happiness. "Meaning is what constitutes happiness and meaning isn't contingent upon pain and tension being absent from our lives." (from his blog of 6-12: www.ronrolheiser.com)

The mature person, it seems to me, puts aside false, superficial notions of perfection as well as unrealistic ideas of happiness, seeking meaning in his or her job, family, religion, soul. This implies that the "good life" is reflective, with goals that are ever changing, as life itself changes.

We are on an unfolding journey not toward perfection or happiness (at least in this life) but toward understanding ourselves and others and achieving the wisdom to cope with life's many imperfections.