A Toast to Being Happy in Small Ways

Having made the choice in the previous post, not to make a bucket list or a will and just to be 'happy in small ways' ,  as Edith Wharton advises, I've had to work out what that means.

• Does it mean being glad, when your toast falls, that it doesn't land on the buttered side?
• Does it mean appreciating what you have (the fact you have toast to eat and a toaster)?
• Does it mean savouring what your senses bring to you like the smell, taste, texture and appearance of the toast...even the sound of it popping?
• Does it mean remembering good times, like the memories of your Gran using her old fashioned two sided toaster?
• Does it mean trying new things, like going camping and making toast on a campfire, that's smokey, half burnt-half raw but perfect because you are so hungry and its all new and can only get better.
• Does it mean finding the funny side to things, that every child will at one time, like you did, answer when asked that question, the same answer you did. Q: What do you put into a toaster? A: Toast ( No bread silly!)
• Does it mean enjoying learning, everything we do in life, from how to use the telephone to homophones - like how we can make toast and make a toast.
• Does it mean trying to have a greater understanding of life like how toast can be a metaphor for how we can be 'happy in small ways' (see above)?

There is something about toast. We have it at every session in our youth centre. It's a quick and easy way to take the edge off hunger and makes the place smell wholesome and it creates, I hope, an association with warmth and security. Comfort-food does as it says.

(This is probably not the time to mention the time we played a prank on one of the workers and convinced him to use toast for table tennis training - bizarrely it worked. But if you do ever hear of 'table-tennis toast' , you know where it came from!)

Bucket List or Will?

Three things have come up recently which have prompted this post:

1. Family gathering celebrating patriarch's 70th birthday
2. Imminent School Reunion
3. Funeral of a Colleague

Family gatherings, reunions and funerals all seem to bring out the same phrase: Carpe Diem - Seize the Day. We seem to be reminded of our mortality and fulfilling our expectations. People write bucket lists (things to do before they 'kick the bucket'). People write wills. 

I don't know where I fall in the spectrum between bucket list and will. I have so many lists which have everything from what I want to do today, this week and into the long term that another list is not necessary. And as I have nothing of financial value to leave, a will is not necessary. 

What is necessary?

'In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one CAN remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways' (Edith Wharton). 

I think I will just try being happy in small ways.

Morals and Ethics: How to Live Well

'What is a Good Life?' 

...asks Donald Dworkin in the New York Review of Books (Issue February 10, 2011)

I wonder what I am striving for, what I am hoping to achieve in my life or with my life. I have done wrong and made mistakes and know the difference - consciousness. I have no problem admitting to making mistakes and realise with experience how much I have learned from them and how little I need to feel responsible for them as long I do learn.  Doing wrong on the other hand, can have learning but a conscious decision to do wrong is very different. That is where the guilt comes.

What is guilt? Is it derived from my Catholic schooling, my parents influence, my peers or is it 'cognitive dissonance' (Festinger, 1957)? What do I do about it? I either change my belief that I am wrong or about what is wrong so I won't feel guilty. Or I find out information that might exonerate me or provide circumstances in which I might not be wrong. Or I demote the importance of the action of the wrong doing. Or I do the right thing so that my actions are in line with my beliefs. Dworkin (2011) suggests:

 '...it is unlikely that we will ever achieve a full integration of our moral, political, 
and ethical values that feels authentic and right. 
That is why living responsibly is a continuing project and never a completed task. 
But the wider the network of ideas we can explore, 
the further we can push that project.'

Is avoiding guilt or cognitive dissonance a good enough reason to do the right thing? Stosny (2008) advocates using the use of our sense of  'responsibilty' rather than guilt to fuel our actions, because it comes from 'basic compassion, with its inherent motivation to improve, appreciate, connect, or protect'. Dworkin (2011) considers ' we have a responsibility to live well and believe that living well means creating a life that is not simply pleasurable but good in that critical way.'

The consciousness I mentioned earlier which indicates the difference in my mind between making mistakes and 'doing wrong' comes across in Dworkin's (2011) explanation of why we should 'live well' (my emphasis):

We are charged to live well 
by the bare fact of our existence as self-conscious creatures with lives to lead.
 We are charged in the way we are charged by the value of anything entrusted to our care.
It is important that we live well; 
not important just to us or to anyone else, 
but just important.

Much in the same way that Smith (1982) mentioned the importance of 'process' over 'product', Dworkin (2011) considers:

The final value of our lives is adverbial, not adjectival -
a matter of how we actually lived, 
not of a label applied to the final result.

So if I want to know, the 'meaning of life', perhaps I need look no further than Dworkin (2011) when he says:

'We can think of living well as giving meaning - ethical meaning, 
if we want a name - to a life.'

Dworkin, R. (2011) What is a Good Life? The New York Review of Books, Issue February 10
Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Smith, M. (1980, 1982) Creators not Consumers, NAYC Publications /Youth Clubs UK, Second Edition
Stosny, S. (2008) Guilt vs. Responsibility is Powerlessness vs. Power, Understanding emotional pollution and power, Issue May in Anger in the Age of Entitlement, Pschyology Today