Well fuck me silly! Just as flu season is upon us, the British Medical Journal publishes a study showing that we can also catch happiness from those around us. Check it out on the good old CBC.
Here’s the takeaway, in case you’re too goddam busy to pay attention to this nonsense:
Happiness is contagious, and the more people you know who are full of good cheer, the more likely it is that you’re also happy…
Happiness extended to three degrees of separation, from friends to friends of friends….
Damn, i’ll have to cull my social calendar now.
“The pursuit of happiness is not a solitary goal,” Fowler said. “We are connected, and so is our joy.”
… Each happy friend boosts your own happiness by nine per cent, the researchers suggest. On the other hand, having grumpy friends decreased the chances by about seven per cent.
Am i a nine-percenter or a seven percenter? Yippee!
And on the requisite downer note:
The researchers are also looking at the spread of depression, loneliness and drinking behaviour.
I spent the weekend at a men’s retreat. This bastion of the 1980s and 90s seems to have plummeted in popularity since the millenium (a Google search on “men’s retreat” brings up a scant 434,000 hits), which brings up the burning question “Why?”. Could it be that men are now so bonded and well-adjusted that they no longer need the rituals and self-affirmations of encounter groups. I doubt it!
Still, i found the retreat idea intriguing, especially since it built on a Men & the Environment conference that featured Victoria’s eco-uber-guru Guy Dauncey, whom i’ve wanted to meet for a long time. Man and the (degradation of the) environment . . . call it a hunch, but is there a connection there somewhere? I went to both events.
So the five stages of men’s retreat for me seem to be: trepidation, hope, deliberate participation, fear of hugs and tears, fun, annoyance, bemusement, getting lost in the woods, and hesitant embrasure. (How many is that?) It was an interesting experience. An eclectic 14 guys — no, men, let’s not shy away from the word — many of whom had experienced the movement years before, some drawn to it, some pushed by crises in their lives.
What did we do in those two days? None of your business is my first response. There’s a reason rituals are guarded — their secrecy gives them much of their force. The big surprise for me was realizing that ritual does have power. Heretofore i’d looked upon it as play-acting or metaphor, and assumed that what efficacy it had comes not from the acts themselves but from their attached cultural significance.
The water altar
I was wrong: the ritual itself induces change in one’s thinking and the conduct of one’s life. And it works in ways that nothing else can. The more i think about it (i’m writing this ten days later), the more i realize the extent to which it has affected me. And the greater my dedication to the arts, which i see as ritual in another guise.
Men’s groups, as it turns out, also come with lots of gushy language and touchy-feely superlatives, to which i am NOT attached in this age of rampant and meaningless exaggeration. (That piece of toast was to die for, it was amazing, it totally changed my life! Pah!) So part . . . much . . . most of my reservations are me being uncomfortable with the physical and the sharing aspect of the weekend. I have pretty much NO experience spilling my guts to men, and that brings with it the correspondingly meager comfort level.
The whole exercise is pretty much one of creating a safe place for men to be with each other in a meaningful way, which is the key. There are plenty of safe places for men — work, the bar, the street, a sports field — but none are particularly meaningful and in none of them do we dare spill our guts or say what’s really on our minds. That’s necessary but almost impossible to find outside of the formal men’s circle.
Would i do it again? I would. I probably will. I might even start organizing a men’s group wherever i end up settling down.
Our three elders/organizers need mentioning:
Michael Tacon, of the Well Foundation, grandfathered the whole thing.
Dr. Steven Faulkner has run men’s groups as part of his medical practice for decades, and was our principal guide through the long Saturday. A steady hand on the emotional volume control. In his words (kind of telling me off for my cavalier treatment of the rites):
[The] purpose of the rituals was to re-enter our own mythological space and reconnect us individually to our universal nature. Once we reconnect to that, then we can return to the work immediately in front of us. Guy Dauncey reminded us that that there is an urgent need for leadership today. We engage where our higher self intersects with our natural skills.
John Shields, ex-priest and current executive director of The Haven (25 years of personal growth courses on Gabriola Island — How could i not have heard about this?‘), wound the weekend up with a striking cosmological perspective of, well, the universe and everything in it. The man has presence. Brought tears to my eyes.
The conference and the retreat were organized by the Well Foundation of Victoria. It was held at the YM/YWCA’s Camp Thunderbird, near Sooke.
Dauncey, incidentally, lives in Saanich, Vancouver Island, and runs earthfuture.com and puts out the Econews monthly newsletter. If you’ve got those world-in-the-toilet blues real bad, Dauncey’s the pill. (Him and action, at any rate.) The man’s an optimist and a visionary and his uplifting message is oh, so welcome in these dark, dark times. Do yourself a favour and check it out.
A woman drives to work in Montreal, on a day like any other. At an intersection near her apartment she stops at a red light and a squeegee kid approaches the car and cleans the windshield. He’s in his late teens, maybe early twenties, and though he looks a little rough around the edges he doesn’t look like a bad kid. She’s seen him a few times before and she never gave him anything, but this time she decides to. All she’s got in the ashtray is a nickel, so she gives him that. He’s not impressed; probably he’s even a bit insulted.
The kid has made this his regular squeegee corner and from that day on she sees him often, almost every day. And every time now, she gives him a nickel. Why a nickel? She figures that it’s something, at least, but it’s not enough for him to go out and buy drugs with.
It goes on for weeks, day after day, weekdays, weekends – whenever they happen to meet at the intersection. She gets rolls of nickels at the bank and keeps them in her car. When he sees her car at the intersection, he heads straight over to clean her windshield and claim his nickel. It’s like they’re friends now; it has become their little joke.
One day she has some time to spare, and maybe he looks a little rougher than usual, so she rolls down the window, gives him a nickel and says, “Would you like me to take you to McDonalds for a meal?”
He hardly hesitates a second before he says, “Yes, I’d like that very much.”
So he gets in, squeegee and all, and they drive to the restaurant for something to eat. They get to talking about his situation, which isn’t a good one, and the woman says, “Would you like some help?”
They talk about that for a while, and then the woman takes out her cell phone and calls a friend of hers who works in a halfway house. Arrangements are made.
After that she doesn’t see him at the intersection anymore, and soon she pretty much forgets about him. The nickels in her car are eventually swept into her purse and spent.
Three months later she’s walking through a mall and a young man walks up to her. She hardly recognizes him, away from the intersection, and he looks a lot different, much more presentable. He recognizes her, though. He has a job now, he says. He has a place to live. And he has something for her, something he’s been carrying around for weeks. He pulls a roll of nickels out of his pocket and gives it to her. They have a good laugh. And then they go on with their lives, feeling a little better about things.
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The woman is my sister, Rhonda, whose open-hearted acceptance of everybody, foibles and all, is an inspiration to me. I wish i had the savvy that could keep a five-cent joke going for that long, and know that a nickel is sometimes much more than a nickel. She’s an artist of life.
I had a delightful reunion with ex-Toff writer babe Brittney today. In a fluke of coincidence, she happened to be inToronto same time i was there, and despite many technological screw-ups, email and cell phone came through to bring about a rendezvous at the funktastic Java House in the too-cool Queen Street district.
Britt & Greg at the Java House
Britt (or “Fresh,” as i like to call her) is one of the few West Coasters whom i consider “real” writers, meaning that writing to her is not a hobby or pastime or therapeutic device but rather a life-blood pursuit. (Me, i could take it or leave it, though i always end up taking it eventually.) I admire those few who truly believe — a gift that seems to be beyond me.
We chewed over our recent travels and the writing life and our prospects and plans, then ate pad thai and she caught a streetcar to the bus station and i walked west on Queen St. Nice.
She has chosen a tough road, but she travels it with humour and grace. I wish her luck.
Here are some just-received words of advice from the keyboard of old Ukee friend Markus (now moved on to bigger and better), whose judgment is unimpeachable:
I think I forgot to say, FUCK UNIVERSITY.
Don’t do it. Since commencing a Masters in 2000, I have stopped writing songs and poems. And stopped dancing — which used to be my identity, no shit. People that knew me before then think of me mainly as a dancing fool.
Nuff said. It kills your soul. Fuck that. Now I work for [a government department].
Okay, that about puts paid to that little pipe dream, ’cause i trust Mark’s opinion more than my own. I also must admit to serious subterranean doubts about the ultimate use of more skoolin’, as i’ve mentioned in a previous entry.
This here’s a good spot to post this Life in Hell cartoon, which spoke to me so eloquently some years ago that i went to some trouble to scan it, and then hang onto the file all this time, now to be posted for your edification. (Click to enlarge, duh.)
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Jee-zus Kee-flippin-rist. As i type this entry musing on my own self-worth, the TeeVee next to the computer displays three musical geniuses playing a Haydn piano-violin-cello trio (i dunno which one). They are twelve years old.
Greg Blee 