The Frown

Turn that frown upside down.., a photo by [Duncan] on Flickr.

'the idea that we can build a financial utopia ...'

'that we can properly translate everything around us into a commodity that we can consume for our personal pleasure ... that if we have sufficient property we can reduce the world to our personal  pleasure dome that will create happiness is a fantasy ... '

'the capitalist dream ... that the world is a playground and we should have a life in which we are comfortable all the time ...'  

'sadly, happiness has come to mean a life that is comfortable ... free of discomfort ... avoiding pain, death, decay ...' 


from Radio National 360documentaries, 10 February 2013

 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/360/the-frown/4440548

Leonard Cohen

'Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama expecting victory after victory and you understand deeply that this is not Paradise - we somehow experience - the privileged ones - we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears is perfectible, that you can get it all straight. I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiecing and you sing it to the real masterpiece.'

from I'm Your Man, a film by Lian Lunson, 2005
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478197/

little miracles

You are behind each miracle, a photo by Daquella manera on Flickr.

from My Week With Marilyn
by Colin Clark 2000
2011 Harper Press, London

p.247
Introduction
'All my life I have kept diaries, but this is not one of them. This is a fairy story, an interlude, an episode outside time and space which nevertheless was real. And why not? I believe in magic. My life and most people's lives are a series of little miracles - strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique.'

Pasternak

_bradley-manning-pride014_, a photo by savemanning on Flickr.

'The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.'

Orchids, dandelions and an intriguing set of genes

White King Orchid, a photo by Brisbane City Council on Flickr.

'Science writer David Dobbs is intrigued by this notion that the genes and traits that underlie some of our greatest weaknesses like despair, difficult behaviour and mental illness could also underlie our more positive aspects like optimism, empathy and resilience.'

'So the conclusion that the researchers drew was that this gene is not really a gene that simply makes you vulnerable to bad behaviour and bad environments, it makes you more sensitive to your environment and your experience and the kind of parenting you have ...

So it's not a gene for vulnerability, it's  a gene for sensitivity to your environment and accordingly it can steer you on a lower darker path if you have a poor environment or a brighter sunnier happy more sociable path if you are luckier in your draw of parents and other things that affect your life.'

'The big change is that it sort of turns inside out the predominant genetic paradigm in psychiatry and much of behavioural genetics over the last 20 years or so ...
This plasticity hypothesis replaces vulnerability with overall responsiveness and it turns inside out the disease model ...
it's not a matter of resilience and vulnerability but how responsive you are to your experience in the environment.'

'And the idea there is to recognise that the patient, the person who is struggling, is not simply vulnerable and doomed through genetics and a history of bad environment to a life of depression or what not but the same responsiveness to environment can be an asset to them because to the extent that they can change their own environment they'll respond to those positive changes more.'

from Radio National, All In The Mind
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/orchids-dandelions-genes/4420952

breathing space

Different Strokes (re-edited), a photo by litratcher on Flickr.

from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson 1985

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/

published by Vintage Books London 2011

p. 137

'... the principle of personal space is always the same whether you're fending off an elemental or someone's bad mood. It's a force field around yourself ... 

they push out their power bit by bit, first within their hearts, then within their bodies, then within their immediate circle. It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It's not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change ...'

'The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door'

Indigenous Transience, a photo by Kalyne Link on Flickr.


'Don't allow your inward being to be hurt by what
You have or have not. Be glad, because every 
Perfect thing is on its way to nonexistence.'

from The Guesthouse With Two Doors

The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez
Translated by Rober Bly and Leonard Lewisohn
2008
Harper, NY
p. 59

'I am the happiest man alive ...'

Resilience, a photo by neekoh.fi on Flickr.

'I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerabale than Achilles: fortune hath not one place to hit me. '

Sir Thomas Browne 1642 Religio Medici
 

Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness

delight, a photo by mayeesherr. (in Sri Lanka!) on Flickr.

Dan Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness.

 
Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.

http://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_gilbert.html