Random Blather

The Face of Evil's back legs don't work. He ruptured one ligament in a back knee, has received surgery and is recovering. While recovering he "tweaked" the same ligament in the other knee. This means he has to stay home and get almost no exercise, making him a sad puppy. Him being a sad puppy is a little sad, but on the other hand it does make him less work and I have been particularly cheerful for the last couple of days.

At the moment in the south there is much terror about President Obama's plans to turn the USA in a socialist country. People are literally afraid of what is happening to their beloved homeland, but when I comment that the worst case scenario is Denmark for the USA they stop commenting on their terror and talk about other things. It turns out that Americans really are a nation of ideologues, supporting theories regardless of the facts. The Cold War was a battle about ideologies, and the USA version won, but meanwhile a compromise snuck into being in Europe taking the best bits of one thought and the best bits of other thoughts. It's going to be hard for some Americans to have won the ideological war of the twentieth century and then have to change their system a little almost immediately after.

It's odd writing these blog posts. The last comment was over a month ago so it's almost as though I'm talking to myself. I hear through third party information that people sometimes read these things, but maybe that is lessening over time. I do know I've told my own mother at least five times about this blog, but I think she hasn't noticed me telling her. People pay attention to what interests them, and me being thousands of miles away from anyone I knew lessens my interest to people. Last weekend I went back to Portland for a wedding and was struck by the very few numbers of people I had known in Portland who were there. I was more worried going into the event of awkward moments and people avoiding me, but what I found was that apart from the married couple I knew two people, who were both very pleasant and both had been living lives apart from mine for years.

Guilt versus Regret

I'm a big fan of guilt and a detester of regret. What is the difference between these two things? In my mind guilt is the feeling that you get when you know you should be doing something. Regret is the feeling that comes about when you wish you had done something differently.

Guilt is the major driving force in my doing things that are not immediately pleasurable or cannot be pictured as being pleasurable. Guilt is the immediate reason I pay bills or mow the lawn as I don't enjoy doing either, and don't expect to enjoy the result. Guilt comes about from me imagining the future and deciding that I will feel badly about a situation if I don't do something not quite as bad as the consequences of not doing it. For a long time I disliked the feeling of guilt, the nagging sensation, the squirming tension, but now I don't mind it. I now know that guilt is something akin to hunger, just a sensation that tells you that you need to do something. I am developing the ability to feel the cessation of guilt in the same manner as the cessation of hunger, a sort of moral satiety. Now, from time-to-time I feel a satisfaction in the process from guilt through action to relaxation. The path from boredom to guilt to action to contented relaxation is a nice cyclical story to participate in.

Regret is the enemy. It is a negative feeling about something that you cannot fix. I tend to feel regret most often when I have said something that was hurtful to others, as I am wont to do. It's not as though I am not already aware that there are things I should not say (even if they are true and honest) but I make many mistakes, and so I don't really learn from regret. Regret tends to happen in a recurring cringe of memory, repeatedly bashing away at my consciousness, from which I mentally recoil and go somewhere else. But how does one deliberately forget? Perhaps the method is to experience the memory but draw away from it the emotion that corresponds to it, to have a memory as one remembers facts rather than as having lived it.

I am having a good day.

Music.

Sometimes I come across a piece of information, or an article, or a documentary that attempts to delve deeply into a subject of great mystery which to me seems not to be such a mystery. The most recent of these is the nature of music, how did it come into being and why is it so prevalent, and why does it mean so much to us. There was a documentary that went into this subject, it seemed to be interviewing all the right people, with brain scans and genius musicians, and evolutionary biologists and so on. However, at the end of it there seemed to be largely the same amount of mystery as at the beginning. So here is my explanation of what music is, how it developed and why it means so much to people.

Music is the combination of rhythm and tone. A single tone with the simplest rhythm is the simplest music. beep beep beep beep is music. Music is a universal in all cultures showing that at least the components of music in humanity are genetically rather than culturally based. To illustrate what that means marriage is universal in all cultures, which doesn't mean a marriage ceremony is genetically based, just that male/female long-term relationships are genetically based. Human beings pair off because of their biology. Human beings understand music and react to it because of their biology.

So, lets take rhythm first. Why is there a human reaction to rhythm. The documentary focused pretty much exclusively on how people and animals react to a rhythmic sound. They found out that some parrots have rhythm in this way but most animals do not. My thought on hearing this is that pretty much all animals have rhythm, just not connected to hearing. Any animal that uses legs to walk or wins to fly or a tail to swim or a heart to beat must have the capacity to regularly perform an action, what I feel is the basis of rhythm. A dog must have the capacity to move legs in a regular time pattern in order to walk across the ground. Imagine a dog that had random time intervals attributed to the movement of its legs, it would fall over. The movement of a body to a regular time period is inherent in almost all animals. This is the origin of rhythm. It turns out that when human beings hear rhythm a very primitive portion of the brain connected to some of the most basic physical actions is activated, which suits this hypothesis very closely.

Parrotdancing

The next portion is tone. A human being listening to an unfamiliar mammal vocalizing for the first time in certain situations will be able to understand some of the meaning of that vocalizing. When we hear a wolf whimper when trying to beg for food from a higher ranked pack mate we understand what this means at a fundamental level. We know what babies who cannot speak mean through various vocalizations. These vocalizations have commonality across species. There is something in our make-up that can distinguish aggression and pain in animals even at the same volume, even if we have not met those animals before. This is due to tone (as a simplified concept). In our genetic make-up is a set of basic emotions or communications based on tone. Everyone in the world laughs, and the noises have the same meaning, even rats laugh. Tone communicates emotion at an instinctive level throughout mammals at the least. The documentary discovered that throughout different cultures the emotional content of music was the same. A guy in the Amazon rain forest identifies which classical pieces are happy, sad, angry and so on, just as a European does. The depth to which the connection between tonal arrangements (chords) and changes (melodies) is beneath culture, it is biological in nature.

Tone

So we have rhythm being a fundamental and primitive part of animals in the world. We have tone being a biologically fundamental part of emotional communication. The next part is simply the human brain putting different parts of the brain together, which is the most striking characteristic of humanity. It is actually how most new ideas are produced and is basic to the concept of thinking.

A human being walks with a rhythm. He hears the sound of his feet hitting the ground. He tries doing the same thing by clapping his hands. He tries doing clapping when one foot lands rather than the other. he notices that when he claps his hands he and other people walk to that rhythm. He speeds it up and people walk faster, become more active, make more noise. He slows it down and people slow down, become more calm.

People naturally make noises to communicate emotion, they try to cheer people up, or calm them down. While clapping their hands people make happy noises. These become regulated by the beat. The rhythm slows down and people experiment with different noises. People remember these experiments, build on them, make them into ritual.

Music is everywhere because the three components that make music possible, rhythm, emotional reaction to tone, and the brain capacity to make new connections between experiences and parts of the brain are within everyone. Music moves you so completely because it connects several parts of your brain that are deeply fundamental to who you are. The rhythm is the feel of your own body in action. The melody is the primal sense of emotion deeper even than language. The combination results in you feeling an emotion directly within your body.

Secret #5 and Summary

The final "Secret" is to give more than you receive. Giving makes you happier than taking, serving makes you happier than being served, helping makes you feel better than being helped. Not too complicated really is it? The author connected this with a sense of being part of something greater, being part of the great web of being, connecting to something beyond ourselves. I'm not sure this is necessarily true, and I'm not sure how it is connected to giving. I'm sure that feeling like there is something bigger than yourself that is intimately connected with yourself helps significantly in providing a sense of purpose, a sense that there is a reason for existence, that what you do matters. However, I think giving makes you happy because there is nothing more pleasant, more significant, more purposeful than to know that you can make other people happy.

Happiness is a socially transmitted virus. Just being around happy people makes you happy, and you being happy makes those around you happy. If anyone's been at a happy event they know that after a while pretty much everyone is happy even if there isn't anything to be particularly happy about. One of the greatest pleasures is simply to be present in a crowd of happy people.

What I have learned from this book is that there are not actually any secrets to happiness. You and I know what are the attitudes and behaviors of happy people. You and I know what we do that makes us happy to the extent that we can be happy, and what makes us tired and miserable and bored. The key is to find the way to transform our lives in such a way to bring about the situation we already know would make us happy. The last two chapters i this book address this point, and they do it in a marvelously simple way. Basically, we do what we think about. If we think about the things that make us happy we are far more likely to do those things. If we think about smiling to people, being generous, appreciating the beauty of what is around us, we are more likely to be people who smile, are generous, and appreciate things. That will make us more happy. If we worry, or have regrets, or tell ourselves we have failed, we are likely to be miserable. If we think about what is lacking we will notice what we lack. If we think about what we have we will be more appreciative of this.

Habits are the key to happiness. I think this might be the wisest thing I have learned from a book about wisdom, that happiness is a habit. To make something a habit you just need to keep focusing on something until you don't notice that you do it. An example in my life is that I used to dislike going grocery shopping, it was a chore. But I have learned to deliberately smile at everyone in the store. Not only does smiling make you feel good, it cheers up the other people at their chores and they smile back at you. Now after perhaps a year of this I find myself automatically smiling when I head into a grocery store. I have a similar response to doing the dishes, warm water and dish soap and an empty mind is really quite a nice combination. For me I will be better off the more of these habits that I develop over time.

The other thing that this book has given me is the opportunity to think about where I belong. Christina and I have moved to Houston, and to this point neither of us feel like we belong here. We aren't really suburban people, we are country or city people. We need a place that is organized around people rather than tasks, places where someone can walk with no particular purpose other than being alive. A place where things of interest appear rather than have to be studiously sought after. I need a place with friends, and friends with whom I can share a common purpose. I have really missed my band probably more than anything because not only were they my friends, but they were my friends with whom I shared a common goal, and that common goal made us happy and was a gift to others.

Secret #4 Live the Moment.

Mindfulnes, being present in the moment, being awake, noticing what is going on, being rather than thinking.
I've talked a lot about this in the blog, instead of thinking everything will be fine once you've done whatever, notice that everything is fine now. You can't do anything about the past so worrying about it is useless. You can't do anything about the future that isn't happening now, so concentrate on now and the future will take care of itself.
This is the only part of the book that has a practical suggestion on how to put these secrets into your life, and in this case it is meditation, which certainly does work to become less worried about the past and future and more peacefully aware of the present.