The pursuit of happiness

So, the time is almost at hand to begin again.  Well, not begin again exactly, but to have a refresh - to shake the old out my hair and take a dip in the pool of new.  So, before I do, I thought it a good idea to think about what I want to do, about what I want to achieve and how I shall do it.

I suppose that by the end of it all I want to be happy, but that is such a fuzzy concept.  You see, I am happy.  True, I don't feel great when I'm at work but it's not as though I am wallowing in misery.  Far from it.  I am blessed with a beautiful partner, a loving family and I have a great imagination which means that for a worryingly-large portion of the day I do not actually live on this cruel planet.  Anyway, happiness is not really anything at all.  It is our nature to focus on the next thing once the last thing we experience is done with.  Therefore, the resulting happiness from now can only ever be a fleeting thing.  And so it should be, otherwise the world would grind to a halt as we all sat round in bovine, chewing contentment. 

So, let us proclaim that it is not happiness which is the point at all. Rather, it is the pursuit of happiness that is the thing.  When that famous phrase appeared in the United States Declaration of Independence it was probably the most revolutionary notion ever.  In 1776 you were supposed to accept your lot in life - handed to you by God or your king or lord whoever - and if that lot included poverty, disease and violence, well, so be it.  You were born to it: accept it with grace.  If you lived a godly life you might, just might, attain happiness in heaven when you died.  Hurrah!

But that brilliant, beautiful nation which eschewed the concepts of rule by monarchy and embraced, not only Christian non-conformity but even - shock horror! - atheism, decided that it was okay to be happy.*  They did not promise happiness, only that you could go after it.  I have a list to assist me in my pursuit which might strike one as being amusing; a list on how to be happy seems contrary to the ideas of freedom and giddiness. Though by nature I am a planned person, that does not mean I am not without spontaneity.  This is a menu of things I want to do, but how I do them shall be down to me and the fates that guide me.  For instance, I should like to write a poem, but if in order to do that I need to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope, then I shall do it.  So here goes:

I, Joanne Victoria Krawec shall in the next six months pursue happiness by these acts or notions:

• Learn how to write a poem and write it;
• Write a book about a super hero;
• Publish research in a magazine or journal;
• Shall never again listen to something that I disagree with and pretend to agree for fear of offending the other party (ies);
• Shall never again suffer dishonesty and instead will call the person out, directly;
• Direct my most worthy and brilliant anger towards the issues of violence against women and poverty instead of getting wound-up by a lack of toner in the photocopier;
• Complete a good dissertation;
• Research and propose an idea for a thesis;
• Collaborate on an artistic project with her new friend, the Black Country artist Natalie Jones (more on this in future posts);
• Publish at least one essay per month on my blog.

Reading this list through makes me feel fantastic.  That, in its distilled intensity, is what I want to do before the clock strikes midnight on 2014.

*A blog entry on American history and the American dream is definitely called for.  Batman and I talk about it all the time.  

How not to be an idiot

I am an idiot.  There is no shame in admitting this.  In fact, confessing one’s idiocy is the first step into doing something about it.  And I definitely want to do something about it.  I now realise that this is the real reason for my journey; my philosophy-in-one.  I want to learn how not to be an idiot.

Not being an idiot is not about being smart.  Any idiot can know stuff – take me for instance.  My history masters course has swelled my head with knowledge; I know so much now that I did not know before. But with this knowing there is a certain smugness, a definite ‘Well, don’t-chya-know’ which really isn’t very smart at all.  The knowledge that I have (that anyone can have) is pathetically tiny in comparison to the vast amount to be learned.  My back-of-a-fag-packet history gleaned so far (though worked hard for and thoroughly enjoyed) is really nothing to crow about.  I could memorise the contents of a hundred-thousand textbooks and still be an avowed idiot.

So you cannot know everything, but can you ever really know ‘truth’ anyway?  Well – no, not really.  I fancy myself the pursuer of truth, with an appropriate superhero costume of course, but unlike my bat-shaped muse I shall never achieve my goal.  Truth, I suspect, is subjective; entirely the possession of the actor and the observer, separate truths, each with no more validity than the other. This maddening reality is all the more emphasised when history is your chosen field of study.  This is because history is the story of human endeavour, and how can you ever really know what someone else thought, felt, hoped and dreamed?  I do not understand myself, let alone other people. ‘Me’ is a shifting, changing thing, somewhat like observing a landscape from the top of a high hill, where the streaking rays of the sun reveal features that were utterly hidden before, only to then be obscured as darkening clouds draw your eyes elsewhere.  I am not unique in this - what we are changes from moment to moment, so being able to ‘know’ all that seems impossible.

So I ask myself, ‘Is history worth it if the truth cannot be known?’  Well, greater men than me have admitted to how little they could ever know but still laboured on.  It was the Delphic Oracle which revealed to the world the first non-idiot.  It said, ‘Socrates is the wisest’.  Socrates (being Socrates) then set out to prove the Oracle wrong, but in doing so he utterly proved its point.  Socrates vox-popped Athens to find men cleverer than he but discovered a common theme to their discussions: namely that the other person believed they knew the truth of the subject being discussed.  Socrates knew this could never be the case.  Thus Socrates achieved that tipping-point when being an idiot becomes being a non-idiot.  Though I, like Socrates, am able to admit I am an idiot, this does not mean that I have achieved his level of self-recognition.  He explored the very limits of human knowledge and what that knowledge actually means.  I am a long way off that and I may not even get that far.

There are other reasons for pursuing non-idiocy.  Michel Foucault said that, ‘The main interest in life is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.’  Well, I do want to change.  That is not an admission of self-hatred.  I acknowledge the person I am now, the journey made to get here and I believe I have brought some small benefit to the world around me.  But there are changes to make nonetheless - though that is a superfluous statement as you cannot stop yourself changing.  That aside, I do think that my idiocy (which is based on a lack of self-awareness or at least a mistaken sort of it) manifests in behaviours that make me unhappy.  This journey is not without its fears and my biggest is that I shall let myself down.  By that I mean I shall not work hard enough on my forthcoming dissertation or whatever else I set my mind to.  I have a habit of doing less than my best, of coasting through things because I can.  But that is not good enough any more.  I now enter a world of clever where that kind of behaviour will not garner the expected results.  Also, I disappoint myself when I know I could do so much more.  If I only went that extra half a mile – imagine all I could achieve?

I also have a tendency to wilfully destroy myself.  I get very close to achieving what I set out to do and then drop it over a cliff to see how fast it falls.  But when I read philosophy or history I can almost sense the change, the shift inside.  For some reason, knowing that some bearded German man in the nineteenth century thought the same things about life that I do, or at least experienced frustrations akin to mine, calms me down.  The only difference between him and me is that he writes about it and his writing is eloquent, informed by his reading.  Also, I do not sport a beard, though I sometimes think I would like to as stroking one must aid ‘serious thought’.  Facial hair aside, I suppose that what I am trying to say is I anchor myself in the past.  The tiny idiocy boat I sail upon stops bobbing up and down aimlessly and crashing upon rocks in a storm.  Instead it settles so I may stare at my own reflection for a time upon the glassy ocean.  I believe the name of my vessel is 'Know Thyself'.