The autumn leaves – the same green to yellow to gold to gone.
My good friend Adam and I were woolgathering via text over the past weekend, and as his words (featured above) often do, he pricked my mind into accepting the fact that October is in full swing – one of my favorite months of the year: where the dry summer heat gives way to the crisp breezes that sanction swirls of leaves in their wake and whisper their reminder that Old Man Winter is on his way.
It’s one of the most fascinating proceedings we have in the world – the annual microcosm of life itself; the cycle of birth, growth, and eventual death in the world around us, yet…scarcely few in American culture take the time to really witness it and bask in the wonderment that it offers. Our way of life provides endless distraction from the threads of time that seem to be woven too quickly in hindsight. It’s a “snap-snap” society where one task is constantly piled onto the previous and our ability to meet insurmountable expectations frequently falls short. There’s always someone who is disappointed, someone who is hurt, someone who passes negative judgement upon the things we say or do – seemingly, we’ve created a culture where nothing is ever good enough.
If you look up the word ‘bliss’, you’ll find its meaning along the lines of this: supreme happiness, or utter joy and contentment.
Isn’t this what we ought to be focused on instead of the mad as a March hare routines that we put ourselves in? But I want to be clear here: American culture gives us “bliss”, right? It gives us American Idol, silver screen cathedrals, NFL football, Gilmore Girls, phone games, colorful advertisements, alcohol – oh the alcohol, casinos, Minecraft, Disneyland, lottery tickets, strip clubs, concerts, and drugs. American culture is fun! We’ve got the “bliss” thing covered – to hell with the fact that we’re the most mentally unstable country on the planet. If you’re not experiencing “bliss” in America, something’s obviously wrong with you, not the system. Here…take this pill and you’ll be happy again.
True to American form, however, none of it is ever good enough. But why?
Author and educator Joseph Campbell once said this about happiness: “Follow your bliss. If you do this, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss.”
What’s problematic about this concept of “bliss” and American culture though, is the fact that we believe the distractions we depend on everyday as coping mechanisms to the stress of insurmountable expectations in other arenas of our lives will bring us happiness. And temporarily, they might. But as soon as the last season of your favorite TV show is over, or you run out of money at the craps table, or the final song at the concert you attended is finished, there’s usually the sinking feeling of knowing that you must “get back to reality”. It’s an insatiable void that most experience and no distraction can permanently fill (though some try with substance abuse). And as is the unfortunate product of such a vicious cycle, we gain “learned helplessness” (google ‘Pavlov’s dog’ if you are unfamiliar with this concept) about our situation – we just accept the idea that this is just how life is and there’s nothing we can do to change it. ‘But hey! Fast and the Furious 19 comes out next weekend, and I can’t wait to see it!’ American culture has become a process of biding our time between distractions, and before one knows it, they find themselves saying: “where did all the time go?”
Before long, your life has gone from green to yellow to gold to gone – just like the seasons, and while you’ve had moments that have brought some happiness, you still have that insatiable void – you’re still missing your “bliss”, and that brings regret. ‘What could I have done differently?’ ‘Why didn’t I realize that was a waste of time before?’
So what does bring us long-term and lasting “bliss” if distractions like movies, alcohol, drugs, theme parks, and money can’t?
The answer is everywhere around us, every day – 7.4 billion options out there. Campbell’s quote from earlier highlights the idea that when you are true to yourself, ‘you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss.’ People may be at the heart of happiness, the foundation (or potential) for which everything else grows from, but love (in its various forms) is the secret ingredient that brings happiness to life via the relationships we build.
Unfortunately in American culture, we aren’t raised nor conditioned nor taught the value of building love-based relationships (with family, with friends, with acquaintances, with co-workers, and yes, with strangers who we may only have one interaction with in our whole lifetime). Instead, we are raised and conditioned and taught to value wealth, status, and physical appearance. We then idealize the love-based relationships we see in movies and TV shows, wishing we could have grown up in a Full House or Brady Bunch-like atmosphere, wishing we could be a real life Harry or Sally or Romeo or Juliet. But what’s funny about the whole thing, is that when you follow your bliss and you have compassion in your heart, real life love is so much better than what we see in the popular culture around us. When you allow yourself to love others – even those who hurt us, take advantage of us, even those whose hearts are filled with hate and that’s all they seem to offer the world – you’ll find happiness, and you’ll live in bliss.
There’s actually a pretty cool piece written by Mary Jo Kreitzer from the University of Minnesota that talks about the science behind relationships and health. Click here to read it, but essentially, those who don’t build strong love-based relationships in life die much earlier and are subject to more devastating health hazards (such as cancer, depression, & heart attacks). I guess that shouldn’t be surprising in a culture like America where a lot of money can be made off of people who have mental and physical health issues.
The underlying problem in all of this, of course, is the realization that the overwhelming majority of Americans were never taught how to love others in genuine fashion. We were never taught the value of strong love-based relationships. And because of this, there are a lot of people who have lost touch – who don’t acknowledge, let alone reflect on the miracle that life is. So please, before the snow falls this winter and all the leaves are dead and gone, find ten or twenty minutes to just step outside and feel the sunshine on your skin. Watch the wind tickle the tops of the quickly dying grass. Take a deep breath of the October air and feel the crispness in your lungs. Think about how wonderful the miracle of life is, and think about how you could better embrace the idea of love in all of the relationships in your life. Think about the concept of “bliss” and what distractions you need to get away from to experience it for yourself.
Don’t continue along the same path of green to yellow to gold to gone. Have a great rest of October folks.