do the maths

85% of us rate ourselves as happier than average...

you can't take it with you

We are born greedy. We want it all. The success, the house, the car, the family. We’re told that we deserve it by a thousand messages, subliminal or otherwise, beamed through the airwaves and newspapers. The notion of sacrifice, not as some emotion laden term, but a simple technical description of leaving some things out and taking other things with you, is all but lost.

One of my favourite Mulla Nasrudin stories features the Mulla watching his friend Wali making yoghurt. He observes how Wali adds a little live yoghurt culture to milk to make a large amount of yoghurt. Nasrudin asks Wali for some yoghurt culture and peels off. Next day Wali sees Nasrudin down by the lake carefully adding yoghurt culture to the great expanse of water. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Making yoghurt,” replied Nasrudin with a far off look in his eyes. “But that’ll never work!” expostulated Wali. “I know,” agreed Nasrudin, “But just imagine if it did!”

We want it all, and we can con ourselves we can get it until we come against a real limiting reality- such as having to carry our entire lives in a rucksack.

Bed. Food. Water. Clothes. Shelter. Kindle if you’re lucky.

And if it weighs much more than twelve kilograms you’ll be suffering. That’s right, get your life down to 12kg. It’s not only possible there are some ultralight backpackers out there who carry three days worth of food and EVERYTHING ELSE in a pack weighing 5kg.

It’s just about realising you can’t have it all.

To get down to the required weight you bite it off from both ends: finding the lightest version of everything and working what you don’t need. You start to get clever and find things that do two things for the same weight: a poncho that becomes a tent, walking poles that work as tent poles, tent pegs you can use as a fire grill, a kindle you can use as, er, a kindle, until it gets wet and breaks and then you can use it as a weight to hold your tent flap open.

You find the lightest sleeping bag and tent. You work out you only need a pair of shorts and a pair of trousers- why not get the kind that zip off to make both. If you get wet you can loiter in your sleeping bag until your trousers have dried out. Or wear underpants that look like swimming trunks.

And so you whittle the weight down. You carry mainly dried food. You work out where your water stops are so you don’t need to over carry liquid. You carry a stove that works on wood as well as meths or solid fuel- thus reducing how much fuel you have to carry.

I’ve even heard of people cutting matches in half to save weight that way. A bit extreme perhaps, but once you start weight watching its hard to stop.

You find out that mostly, people carry too much. One test is, after a trip, to make three piles, the first is stuff used everyday, the second is stuff never used, and the third is stuff used once or twice. You ditch the last two piles and only take the first on your next trip.

By such exercises you begin to learn how much you need in life. Not much. As long as you are moving forward along your path you need only that which keeps you going. It isn’t that different from your walking gear: shelter, bed, food, a few books instead of the kindle.

We accumulate stuff, tons of it, and it can very easily own us. Just looking at stuff, spread out round the house, can really drain you of energy. I deliberately write in a place devoid of any books, any clutter. It feels much freer, much lighter. As the saying goes: it’s easy to makes things heavier, the real skill is in making life lighter. Which brings us neatly to:

three rules of happiness

Happiness is a slippery word. We know what we mean by it when we use it, often in the negative- “So and so’s not happy” we say and everyone knows what we mean by it. Or, if asked by the waiter at the end of the meal “Were you happy with your meal?” we know exactly what is meant- especially if there was a curly hair in the boeuf bourguignon.

We're not so clear about more open ended usages. The word tends to get stretched out and over applied. People talk of ‘searching for happiness’, which conjures up images of looking for a lost child or maybe the gold at the end of the rainbow. There is much talk of some nations being ‘happier’ than others – but when you actually see how the survey was compiled you begin to doubt its utility.

You hear people say, at the end of a doomed relationship ‘you know I was never really happy’.

You hear people intone, ‘I just want to be happy. I deserve a little happiness.’

What they mean, often, is simply a reprieve of ill fortune, a let up in the bad luck or illness that has buffeted them. But when this let up happens they often still describe themselves as ‘unhappy’.

First Rule: happiness is a decision, first and foremost. By making this decision, even if it seems a tad over optimistic, you are laying claim to happiness as your right rather than something special. Travel the world and visit the poor places and you'll see happy faces everywhere. Ever seen rich people picking up their cars at valet parking? Miserable faces rule. You don't need anything to be happy. Even with poor health you can find happiness where you may not have expected to find it. You just need to decide.

Second Rule: everyone has a ‘main problem’- when it is solved, the problem lower down the list gets promoted and becomes the new ‘main problem.’ Such people go through their lives worrying about their ‘big’ problems. As they actually solve a lot of them you are left with the spectacle of someone worrying in old age about very trivial problems- a draught, food being late, a routine upset- these are the ‘main problems’ of someone who was rather successful at solving real problems during their life. What they lacked, crucially, was awareness of what was going on. They lacked what Adam Smith termed: the impartial spectator.

We know Adam Smith primarily from his theories in economics, but he also wrote on philosophy. He noted that in moral philosophy the key move is not to identify immutable rules- variations on the Mosaic code but with knobs on so to speak, but to take the more sophisticated route and look at how to improve one’s behaviour before devising a rule that ‘tells us what to do’. Mostly we know what to do- the problem is we don’t do it. We either allow ourselves to get carried away by others or we drown out the inner voice that tells us what we ought to do. Or, very often, we simply don’t put in place the external conditions needed to do the right thing. For example, if you know you fall over and hurt yourself when drunk, only drink at home in an empty room.

How do we improve? By simply using Adam Smith’s impartial spectator- that part of you that does not judge but simply notes ‘ah, you have just forgotten the keys again’, for example. No berating is necessary, indeed that seems to stop the magic from working. Because awareness is all you need. Once you are aware in a non-judgemental way of a problem it will fix itself, by which I mean YOU will fix it but not in the manner of an irritated parent lecturing a child for the nth time. The reason it works is that when you berate yourself you actually abolish the impact, you ‘punish’ yourself in order to be let off. But when you simply observe a defect and move on, cognitive dissonance works to solve the problem. Cognitive dissonance is powerful stuff- we are consistency loving creatures and when something deeply inconsistent is brought into our attention but with no absolving emotion attached we adjust to shift that bad behaviour from our lives.

Now, to get back to happiness, we can see that the impartial spectator, or observing self, needs to be used to improve one’s life. Using it, sharpens it. In traditional philosophy sharpening the clarity and force of the observing self  was called ‘polishing the mirror’. You can see why: the observing self mirrors what we do and shows up what we do for our own inspection. As long as we pay a bit of attention, as long as we are not in too much of a rush. Which brings us to the next rule.

Third Rule: Being in a bad rush is usually a bad idea.

There are good rushes- rushing for a train with a friend when it doesn’t matter if you miss it, rushing to get shopping done before a party- but mainly when we rush it’s neither fun, productive or inducing of anything we might term happiness. So to even get in the zone of examining happiness we need to cease being in a rush.

So what is it we are really talking about here?

Contentment? Flourishing as a human? Personal growth?

Or is it the absence of pain, noise, irritation?

Is happiness therefore better defined as our normal everyday human state which pertains as long as we don’t mess our lives up or clutter them too much.

I think this is true. Happiness is not something you get- like a new car or a cocaine high, it's something you have been given as part of the package of being human. We’re not so much better than dogs in this regard- and in many cases decidedly worse- since dogs are basically happy. Happiness is the default dog setting unless bad things happen repeatedly and that default setting gets reset.

Happiness is a decision. You may not be instantly happy having taken that decision. There may be all kinds of things in your life stopping you from feeling happy right here and now. But soon enough you will feel moments of happiness breaking through. Moments of euphoria may elude you, maybe it will simply be moments of contentment and deep pleasure but, like the sun behind clouds they will appear. And as you observe yourself better and better, solutions will impose themselves providing better and better glimpses of happiness.

But first comes the decision: I have decided in my life that I am happy.

Once that decision is made you will find yourself making yourself happy in whatever situation you find yourself. And we humans are very creative- we are actually pretty good at making something out of nothing. Once you have decided to be happy as your default setting you will find happy places to occupy wherever you are. You’ll make the best of things whatever they may be.

a real japanese micro-adventure

http://sukikatte.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/koboro/

Timbuctoo by Tahir Shah

Reading an early copy of Tahir Shah's novel Timbuctoo- incredible maps- intriguing story.

the path

Many attempts to better oneself, or some part of oneself have been called ‘a path’, or even ‘the path’.

I wonder if these metaphorical paths started as real paths, a real way you had to follow to get somewhere. A test which, among other things, involved walking.

Over the years attention has congregated around the rewards of following such and such a path. So much has been said or written about these religious paths that the original impulse has, perhaps, been overlooked.

Instead of looking at metaphorical paths why not walk real ones?

Ordinary paths go somewhere, or promise to. Some paths are straight, others windy. But when you are on the right path it is always straight, so to speak. The best paths, from a walker’s point of view, neither rise nor fall but follow a ridge line or, even better, the side of a long ridge, so that one has uninterrupted views of the valley below but do not have to pay for them by strenuous climbing or getting blown about on a ridge line. A high path, straight, but not straight up.

You can make up your own route. I’ve done this a few times- in the desert it’s easy- just point and walk. In the country in Britain or France you can cobble together a likely route by linking up paths, tracks and roads. But often it’s more fun, and certainly easier, to follow a set path- a national long distance route or a Grande Randonnee.

The adventurer in me is troubled by this, or used to be. Surely following the packaged route is a cop out, less of an adventure? Maybe. But following the designated route is a path, a bona fide path and therefore a pilgrim’s route of sorts.

For a start you can plan your days, work out your miles and likely stopping places. They’ll be sign posts so you won’t be nose in map the whole time, which always means you see less. They’ll be other walkers to meet and swap notes and stories with. Because of the ease of route following you can drop down a gear in vigilence and go into the deep meditative state that allows you to solve problems in depth, think things through without a hitch. Wordsworth used to prefer tracks to rough ground for walking because he could think up poetry so much better when he didn’t need to watch every footstep. Something similar is true of the long distance path.

It isn’t always obvious which is the right path to walk, the right one for you. It might be something well known that you have always wanted to do like the Pennine Way or the South West Coastal path. For me a strong attraction was the chance to walk through places I had been to as a child. The path as perspective on personal history.

Of course it’s nice to see wonderful views, they are a bonus, guaranteed usually on a well known walk. Wildlife too is always welcome. But making the miles is more important than either. That doesn’t mean one has to be in a rush. You can go as slowly as you like, but you have to make the miles. Otherwise you’re not paying your way, you’re just strolling, a civilian not a pilgrim. Making the miles means you aren’t just consuming the countryside. It’s a ritual like praying at certain times of the day. The ritual defines the day and leaves holes for other stuff, important stuff.

Carrying your own gear and food seems important too. I was not surprised to discover that the marathon des sables insists on each runner carrying his sleeping bag, clothes and food for six days- but not water. It’s a race so why impose this extra weight? I think because this desert marathon is also a kind of rite of passage, a pilgrimage of sorts and pilgrims carry their simplified life with them, on their back like a tortoise’s shell.

Walking the path is about simplifying life so much that things you don’t usually notice have a chance to break through. You create enough silence, shut down enough static, that, over a sustained period, you begin to relax deeply, go with the flow, the flow of the path.

It isn’t just about living in the present either- though that is always very welcome. Somehow, while walking day after day, one’s sense of the future also becomes expanded. One has the leisure to make endless plans. And our sense of the past is expanded too, lots of time to digest things that happened to us, put them in perspective- nothing ever seems so pressing and overwhelming while walking.

When we expand our sense of past, present and future, time slows down- psychological time. We no longer feel life is rushing past. And when it is over you’ll remember the days or weeks of that walk for the rest of your life.

welcome to the temporary autonomous zone

Whacko philosopher Hakim Bey (whose stuff I love by the way) coined the very useful idea of the TAZ- temporary autonomous zone. The idea is that freedom only really exists in things on the move or sited someplace temporarily. You can see the gist: we've gone from cultures with plenty of common land to places where every inch is owned and policed, kind of; much of it with scary but often ineffective CCTV cameras. Ah, I can feel my PQ (paranoia quotient) rising! There's the clue: a lot of this stuff is all in the mind. I keep having to recall the 'licence fallacy'- broadly speaking people who make their own cars find the easiest part getting them licenced for the road (because inspectors sympathise and are interested in their projects) yet the uninformed always assume 'the red tape' is the hardest part of the project- the deal killer- when it isn't. I have to remind myself that but I too set up a business in Egypt when I would have been scared to in the UK because of my imagined ideas about red tape. Of course ballsy real businessmen just plough on regardless, and, compared to Europe I understand few places are as easy to start businesses as the UK. But those implanted ideas are strong. A friend who settled in Australia recently told me 'The UK just doesn't have an entrepeneurial feel'. Hmm- more negativity we just don't need. But the grain of truth refuses to be silenced, and, it turns up in the idea of the TAZ and walking.

A long distance walk is a perfect temporary autonomous zone. You stop when and where you like. No one has tabs on you. You can convene meetings around the campfire. Your spirits rise. Long distance walking festivals could be the next big thing now that festivals are becoming a little too pricey, a little too corralled.

When I lived in Tokyo in the 1990s every year on halloween night, a train on the yamanote circle line would be commandeered for a moving party. Maybe there could be a Pennine Way festival, or better, a Southern Upland Way festival. The idea being that it keeps on moving- even if you join it half way along you have to walk to keep up with the party.