The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [26]
If you think Kipling had some motivational excess, wait until you hear George Bernard Shaw. “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”4 Again, such sentiments make most sense in love and war. Winston Churchill was rousing because his rhetoric had an appropriate context. We do not want to live our whole lives in blood, toil, tears, and sweat. It is a trance of value, and there are times when we need to be in a trance. Churchill’s rousing advice is appropriate to sieges. It is part of our trance, too, though, and we are not being bombed, hiding in tube stations, shaking rubble out of our kids’ hair and trying to find the courage to survive. We today are ridiculously goal oriented, rushing around like madmen and encouraging each other to reach for the stars, buy real estate, and add free weights to our workout. Most wisdom literature warns against taking the mundane world so seriously. Instead, perhaps, have a cup of tea, work a few hours on some long-term project, talk to your children or your neighbors. Seize the life. Carpe vitam.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” of 1841, is a classic in the literature of taking what is yours, the gist being: “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” It was a plea for Americans to stop slavishly imitating the past or the Old World and instead invent its own genius.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.5
You have to figure out what instrument your heart plays, and if that turns out to be something different than what you wanted, tough luck. Say you want to be William S. Burroughs but your words come out sweeter. Emerson says you must learn to respect this sound you produce, this sweet Burroughs, as a power new in nature, and you are the only source of it in the universe, and the only way we can find out what it does is for you to squeeze your heart and let the sweet Burroughs play. It is a brilliant piece of happiness advice. For those who have a reason to enjoy life as a grand campaign, Emerson will console you in your troubles. Emerson identified himself as a disciple of ancient Stoicism, so it is not surprising that one of his key points is to do what is in front of you to do, to play the part you find yourself inhabiting. But Stoicism rejected the starry-eyed fantasy of an individual attaining greatness. Emerson adds a motivational note, previously reserved for war and kisses, to the Stoic vision of the self: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.”6 There is no rest here, and this exhortation to action and constant self-realization was one starting place of modern self-help.
This call for constant growth means a constant rejection of your past.