on wheelchairs and treadmills

I noticed him because he was ostensibly reading The New Yorker as he sat in his wheelchair at my "home office" coffee shop. It was The New Yorker that caught my eye, not the wheelchair. No, it was the combination of the two. For no rational reason, I felt it was an odd mix. That betrays a bias I had not recognized in me, the notion that someone so incapacitated is incapacitated in more ways than the obvious physical ways. In the back of my mind had I consigned him to only reading the Daily News? (I enjoy both periodicals.) "Incapacitated" seems like the wrong word, too harsh, too confining. Maybe paracapacitated or quasicapacitated.  

I began to notice he was a regular, always reading, almost always smiling, conversing with other denizens of the hangout. 

One day, I walked up to him and said, "I see you're a New Yorker reader, too. It's my breakfast companion."

"Isn't it great?"

"It is."

I referred to a recent issue that grabbed me, one of those epic examples that you want to save, even in a digital world. I can't remember for sure why I felt that or what issue it was or what was in it. It may have been the Rachel Kushner profile. He later told me he read her latest novel.

The next time I introduced myself by name and got his name. 

Rupe. 

We got talking, easily. I sat beside him.

He has a doctorate in education from Columbia. Taught science. He suffered a bicycle accident in Central Park last year. He has amnesia of the tragedy. It was a hit and run. Cameras couldn't make out the license plate number. Millions of dollars in medical expenses. He is from Guyana. Up here in Syracuse to be with his family, or them with him. Compression fractures in his upper spine. Might possibly walk some day. Can't do any more physical therapy this year because he reached his limit of twenty visits, and it's just June.

"But you're always smiling. You seem genuinely happy."

"What are you going to do? What can I do?"

"I could understand if you were bitter."

He explained how he indulged in bitterness at first and sometimes now, but determined it hurt no one but himself and those around him. He said he has to make the best of it and might as well do so without adding the burden of mental and spiritual misery.

I'm paraphrasing. 

I mentioned to Rupe, roughly and approximately, what Daniel Gilbert said in "Stumbling on Happiness." Gilbert cited a 1978 study that said, pretty much, a paraplegic and a lottery winner were equally, though not quite, as happy or unhappy, a year after the life-changing event. He spoke of this in a TED talk in 2004 and then made some corrections ten years later.  

"So, are you happy?"

Rupe smiled. A genuinely bright and infectious smile.

I felt foolish asking the question and slightly ashamed for not being, well, happier myself.

"Is it simply a gift you are open to?" I persisted.

Rupe repeated the "what are you going to do" theory, and talked about his family.

Or else I don't recall how else he explained his happiness. I'm remembering this poorly, skewed by time and the prejudice of my own perspectives.

After that encounter, I went back to see if I accurately remembered the Daniel Gilbert thing about a year after someone won the lottery or lost the use of limbs. Pretty much remembered correctly.

Then, the internet being what it is, along with my discursive mind, I wandered off into such matters as "hedonic adaptation" and the "hedonic treadmill."

Hedonic treadmill. The rat race, right? Scientists study prisoners, widows, married or divorced people, and, yes, those with severe spinal injuries.

We're never satisfied. We get more and then want more. 

Ancient concepts. In 1621, in "Anatomy of Melancholy," Robert Burton wrote, "Desire hath no rest, is infinite in itself, endless, and as one calls it, a perpetual rack, or horse-mill.^"

Abundance denial. A since-deceased mentor of mine would often say, "If I have enough, I have abundance."

I love these terms.

Great book or poem titles. Or band names.

I too tread my own treadmill, sometimes I trudge it. Only rarely do I jump off it. Maybe it's going too fast and I wonder where it will fling me.

What would Rupe do?

WWRD.

an interview with my self

Q. Why do you want to go to Iceland?

Why not?

Q. How did you manage to pick that land, as opposed to say, Ireland, Finland, or Queensland, Australia?

I'm not sure. It popped into my head. The idea of going to Iceland began to intrigue me. Kind of an impulse buy. I needed to relieve some stress, so I figured, Go north. True north. True self, self. Plus, I recalled reading in Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" that people in Iceland ranked highly on happiness scales.

Q. What do you hope to accomplish with your trip to Iceland?

"Accomplish"? Maybe nothing. Maybe some self-reflection. Maybe a good time. To be fair to myself, I do have to allow for the remote possibility that I will have a dreadful time. It's not my hope or my expectation, but one must be prepared. Nevertheless, I am confident Iceland and I and its people will have a splendid time.

The Saga of the Especially Special Specialist

I once had a job (sounds like a mundane start to "Norwegian Wood") whose title was Project Specialist. They made up the title because they needed to call me something, and they didn't exactly have anyone who was just a technical writer. That wouldn't sound, um, technical enough. How special I felt that first day, back in February 1999. After all, I was now a specialist, and not just any kind of specialist but a project specialist. Being a specialist distinguished me from the hoi polloi of all those plebeian generalists out there, or within the firm.

Turns out, the House of Specialists is bursting at the seams with residents. In fact, we all have a room there. I'm just down the hall from you, and you. Especially special you.

This weekend, I just finished a book I had blogged about even before I read it: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

I can report it is entertaining and informative. It may even change the way I think (which may or may not make me happy, but that is only part of the story). At one point Gilbert writes:

Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn't see herself as average. Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student, most business managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager, and most football players see themselves as having better 'football sense' than their teammates. Ninety percent of motorists consider themselves to be safer-than-average drivers, and 94 percent of college professors consider themselves to be better-than-average teachers. [p.252]

He goes on.

I suppose he could just as easily have written, "Every blogger considers himself or herself especially special, with insights more worth sharing than anyone else and insights more worthy of comments than anyone else."

Or else, why do we all bother tapping the keyboard keys, hunh?

I'm not sure this stumbling onto specialness diluted by everyone else's special specialness makes me happy or not.

I think not.

Maybe it's a topic for me and my therapist on Wednesday.

Then again, I'm a little fearful my therapist may pull a Dr. Melfi on me, just as she did on Tony Soprano. My therapist might feel that I'm using therapy simply to validate my pathological special specialness that goes by the especially special name of solipsism.

Harpooning Happiness

Ah yes, harping on happiness. That's what we do; we harp on the subject, plucking that one string, over and over, in the hope we will hit the perfectly right note, get the right vibration, usually never even considering to harp on another string, perhaps on the other end of the scale.

Or maybe it's harpooning happiness, vigorously attacking the object of our desire -- even if it kills it, or us, in the process.

I gather this makes me sound like a Midwestern Methodist minister, to mumble alliteratively, but here's what got me thinking about all this. In last Saturday's New York Times I spied a banner advertisement (advert, as the Brits say; ad, as we say) anchoring (can a banner anchor?) the bottom of a page. It was red and white and featured an overturned bowl of cherries [obvious cliched metaphor of sledgehammer weight and proportions for "happiness"].

The ad announced the arrival in paperback of a book called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It looked interesting enough, so I unevenly tore the ad away from the rest of the paper, discarded the day's dreary news and kept the sloppily torn-out shred for future reference. Days later (today), I Yahooed a search of the book title and got this.

Then I browsed around and got this very cool video. Very intriguing.

In short, it appears the gist of the findings of Gilbert's lab at Harvard, and of others who study affective forecasting, is that we don't quite know what makes us happy or why. He seems to be saying two things:

a) that which we think makes us miserable may not, not quite -- at least not in the way we imagined or predicted

b) the same for happiness.

Some of these heavy-duty techno geek psychology experts call this, er, the Big Wombassa.

Why didn't someone tell that to me when I was salivating over all those centerfolds in, um, my earlier years?

There's some solace in this, too (not that I've read the book yet, but I think I will): namely, after dreaming of my Giants' winning the World Series since 1955, and not having that dream come true (tantalizingly and agonizingly close in 2002) I can now imagine nothing could ever live up to what I've imagined that "happiness" to be, not now. Just ask Red Sox fans. Was it really that fulfilling? Maybe.

Speaking of bats and balls, is sex, for example, usually as thrilling and as fulfilling as imagined?

In his TED lecture at Oxford, Gilbert says something like this: studies show that a year after either winning the lottery or being paralyzed, people are about equally happy! Does that mean both events are equally desirable? Of course not. But he does provide scientific, and entertaining, data on the human ability to synthesize, create, happiness. And I guess that's why I've got to read more about this subject, this so-called happiness.

I'll be in Berlin for a week, so you may be happy (or unhappy) (or unharpy) to know I'll be out of pocket, more or less.

Tschuss!