We’re supposed to get hit with some more snow this week. Initially, the call was for about 8 inches today and another 8 on Thursday. That call has been revised down to 3-4 inches for the first round and up to 10 inches for the second. I’m trying to adjust my attitude about the weather. I’m trying to see more beauty in it. I’ve lived in State College before and I’ve lived in Pennsylvania all of my life. I know that winters can be tough and that from time to time, this white fluffy stuff falls from the sky. It is pretty when it coats the pine trees and there’s a hush to the landscape when everything is blanketed. But I sometimes wonder if it requires a certain disposition to really enjoy the cold, gray, and snow… and why don’t I seem to have it?
I remember when I was in college up here, we had gotten a lot of snow. I also remember reading (or hearing or completely making up) that State College was one of the cloudiest places in the country. According to USA Today, our average hours of full sun per day is at 3 hours 53 minutes (by comparison, Seattle gets 3 hours 54 minutes). Some facts provided by google… State College gets about 44 inches of snow a year (the national average is 28). State College has about 35 more days of precipitation per year than the national average, and 30 fewer sunny days per year than the national average. Looking at historical data going back to 1980, the three snowiest years here were when I was in college… 1992/1993 (92.5 in.), 1993/1994 (109.3 in.), and 1995/1996 (99 in.) – all three years were double the average. According to one source, we’re at about 38 inches for the current season (as compared to last year’s 13 inches). With another 10 – 15 inches we’ll be above average for the year.
The stats are just to prove to myself that I’m not crazy, to prove to myself that there might be good reason for bad moods. For a few weeks I’ve been stressed, grumpy, and an overall bummer – what some might consider to be “not good company.” And while I try to maintain my sense of humor, I worry that to those closest to me, I’m beginning to feel like a Denny Downer. I talk with my friend Stacy nearly every day – I have to imagine that hearing more negative than positive isn’t fun for her. I talk to my folks once a week – I complain about the weather or some of the petty frustrations at work or how it sucks to be isolated during this pandemic. I am, by nature, a critical person – but not usually just for the sake of being critical and I try to avoid being negative. I usually try to see the good and the bad as I settle in on a cool tone of gray in a balanced space somewhere in between. I feel as though lately, I’ve been out of balance – that the scales have tipped towards negativity and that if I don’t find a way to re-balance, I’ll fall in to a pattern or develop a habit or cultivate resentment and a victim mentality.
Last week I read an article in The Atlantic “There Are Two Kinds of Happy People.” It’s part of a weekly column called How to Build a Life – a theme that I’ve been exploring for a few years now. The article begins:
I have found that most of the serious approaches to happiness can be mapped onto two ancient traditions, promoted by the Greek philosophers Epicurus and Epictetus. In a nutshell, they focus on enjoyment and virtue, respectively. Individuals typically gravitate toward one style or the other, and many major philosophies have followed one path or the other for about two millennia. Understanding where you sit between the two can tell you a lot about yourself—including your happiness weak points—and help you create strategies for a more balanced approach to life.
In a nutshell’s nutshell, the author traces the approaches to happiness to either stoicism or hedonism. In really broad strokes, the Stoics believe that suffering is part of life and that by wading through it one might earn happiness (or at the very least – they accept suffering as the flip-side of the coin of happiness). In similarly broad strokes, the Hedonists believe suffering is to be avoided and prefer to focus on enjoyment (when faced with suffering, they focus on the positive). Spoiler alert: not surprisingly, the author lands squarely in the middle and suggests we would do well to cultivate our weaker sides.
For most of my life, I think I’ve been firmly planted in the Stoic’s camp. I was raised on the value of hard work, and enduring set backs, and practice makes perfect, and always show self-control. I was taught to believe that with freedom comes responsibility and that we live in a meritocracy that rewards effort. Now, I’m considerably less sure of those beliefs. Now, I find myself more curious about what the hedonists have to say. Which sounds all too typical of a white man, my age, and of modest privilege (I joked that I got a tattoo because it was cheaper than a corvette, healthier than a coke habit, and less emotionally shallow than finding a trophy wife). If I’ve suffered a mid-life crisis, it has been an Oedipal attempt to slay some of those Stoic teachings in favor of a more care-free pursuit of pleasure. If I’ve suffered a mid-life crisis, it has been because I’ve seen how for many people, hard work is not rewarded or becomes a never-ending treadmill while for others, good fortune (as opposed to hard work) breeds opportunity and further good fortune. Here, too, I paint with very broad strokes that hint at my disappointment in the lack of fairness in the world (bitter, party of one – right this way… your table is over here, but all the chairs are with that group over there – they didn’t work for them and don’t need them, but took all of them anyway – mostly because they could and chairs are the in thing these days).
I may have spent most of my life as a responsible and dutiful Stoic, but I suspect I’ve always had this latent hedonist buried within. In our family of good and serious Germans, I was the sensitive one, the less traditional one, the more go-with-the flow one. I watched as my brother tried and failed to please our father and perhaps more by default than intention, I took a different approach – keep a low profile, do enough to get by, walk away with dignity because the fight for attention probably isn’t worth it. I don’t know how much of that was in rebellion to our family norms or how much of it was an ambivalent attempt to define myself by remaining malleable, but the result has been a personality that is willing to suffer, wants to find passion, and usually only rocks the boat in the smallest, most imperceptible ways. If I vacillate, it’s more like the vibration of a tuning fork than it is the wild arc of a pendulum. And some days I want to be the pendulum.
That was, until these last few years…
When I was married, I had the security and support of my wife which allowed me to take a chance on redefining myself. I had switched from publishing to teaching and eventually non-profit work, and I was quietly working my way up through those ranks. But with the end of the marriage and the kiddo out of the house, I began flirting with cultivating my other side. I was single with few responsibilities to anyone but myself. I began pursuing happiness as opposed to status or money or security (not that I was terribly good at pursuing status or money before). I took up exercise and running. I started hiking again and going out to live shows – two things my ex and I had done early in our relationship. I also started thinking, quite earnestly, about what I wanted out of a relationship.
As I entered the dating pool, having never really dated before, I paid attention to everything and everyone. I was clumsy but sincere – new and learning to walk. I dated a few people who had been doing the dating thing for a few years – weathered veterans who tended to be cautious at best and jaded at worst. I was determined not to be them (they usually laughed at my optimism). I also dated a few people with whom I felt a real connection. As I practiced and learned, I began to notice a pattern in the types of women I was most attracted to or got along best with. For a brief while, everyone I dated loved music, drank, had a motorcycle and a few tattoos. But the ones that stood out were always kind, funny, artistic, and somewhat free-spirited. We hit it off because I usually presented as being the same – one referred to me as her California guy. I was never trying to misrepresent myself (I’m genuinely kind and maybe even a little funny), but the artistic and free-spirited aspects were “in development.” If those relationships failed (and given that I’m not with any of those people, I suppose there’s not a whole lot of “if”) it was, in part, because the Stoic took over. If things got serious, I got serious.
I didn’t really know this was happening until I was engaged to get married and it ended abruptly. It was the type of shock that made me question everything. It made me give serious consideration to the notion that what we seek in others is often what we feel is missing within ourselves. I don’t think that’s a bad thing – effective dependency. It’s how we learn and grow. But we also have to be able to develop some of those things on our own. The irony is that among the the things I admired most in that person was the thing (a fearless independence and free spirit) that made it easy or possible for them to walk away. In our relationship, through therapy and especially at the end, I had taken the Stoic’s approach – it’s hard work and it’s work worth doing. This still rears it’s head in the poems I post about love and relationships. Stephen Dunn (who I quote often) writes of love’s disappointments and Adrienne Rich wrote, it is “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” From the ex-fiancee, I was hoping to learn to be less serious, to pursue happiness in a different way. I saw in her what I felt lacked in me. She was, in a sense, an Epicurean.
From the article in The Atlantic:
For Epicurus, unhappiness came from negative thoughts, including needless guilt, fear of things we can’t control, and a focus on the inevitable unpleasant parts of life. The solution was to banish them from the mind. To this end, he proposed a “four-part cure”: Don’t fear God; don’t worry about death; what is good is easy to get (by lowering our expectations for what we need to be happy); what is terrible is easy to endure (by concentrating on pleasant things even in the midst of suffering). This is made all the easier when we surround ourselves with friendly people in a peaceful environment.
One of the things she would say to me was that she needed peace and calm. Living in Philly with it’s harsh winter and somewhat harsh personality, working a demanding job in which her boss belittled her and where she didn’t feel like she fit in, and being in a relationship that started easy and turned Stoically into work (hard work)… something had to give.
Preparing for more snow and thinking about how we each pursue happiness and meaning, I can admire her ability to leave in search of her happiness. Having done it myself, I know how hard it is to make that leap and some of the sorrows that come with leaving. I can see the benefit of both approaches (sticking it out or moving on). As Brooks writes in The Atlantic, “Too much of one—a life of trivial enjoyment or one of grim determination—will not produce a life well lived, as most of us see it.” I’ve often felt that I can make meaning just about anywhere, but that it’s all made easier if I can “surround myself with friendly people in a peaceful environment.” In the end, it’s always about balance and timing, choice and acceptance, and the small vibrations between the extremes that keep us from falling wildly on our face in any one direction.