GinnyS

For years, I’ve puzzled each holiday season over the question of presents.  I love giving presents, and I love receiving presents.  But I don’t want to give or receive unwanted “junk” — especially since I now understand the toll that our consumer culture exacts on our environment. Nor do I want to spend more than a modest amount of money, regardless of come-ons from stores, catalogues, or the media cheerleading a holiday spending frenzy.

So what to do?  Here are some solutions that make me happier:

• Buy second-hand.
• Re-gift.
• Make presents.
• Shop local art and craft — directly from the artist, if possible.
• Support causes in your gift buying.
• Invest in shared experiences.
• Buy small — fun, meaningful, “stocking stuffers.”
• Choose items people use anyway — say, nice soaps or teas.

In recent years, two of these options have brought me great joy.  In my community, we have an annual “re-gifting” party: The Women of Maple Corner Yankee Gift Exchange.* This fun and funny event is a big hit every year, with the added benefit of forming strong community bonds among the celebrants.

And every other year, my family invests in a week at the beach instead of presents under the tree.  This experience not only relieves the pressure to buy gifts but also definitely increases happiness for all of us sharing a quiet week at the ocean.  Research has shown that experience leads to a more long-lasting happiness high than that provided by getting new stuff.

Those are my answers.  I still get to give and get, which I love (especially the giving) — in a happy, not stressful or harmful, way.  How ’bout you?  What are your choices?

* The men were also invited to join this event, but declined.

There’s a new addition to the growing list of publications on how to be happy, whether you live in the United States, Singapore, or anywhere in between: Thrive, Finding Happiness The Blue Zone Way by Dan Buettner.  Dan, his travels, and the results of his extensive research, were recently featured on Good Morning America. On that broadcast, Dan revealed his picks for the happiest places on four continents.  I’ll bet some of the choices will surprise you! I know three out of the four took me by surprise.

You can learn what the four places are and why by clicking on the link below.  You can also learn the four keys to greater contentment — to thriving! — by getting a copy of Buettner’s book.  I’m going to go do that right now…

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/HealthyLiving/video/finding-happiest-place-earth-12086133

What would you do if you won millions of dollars?  A couple of working class Canadian seniors gave it all away (except for 2% saved for emergencies)!  They seem pretty happy to me.  See what you think:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/atlantic/maritime-community-hits-jackpot-as-lottery-winners-give-away-prize/article1785586/

When we heard about the Jon Stewart Rally to bring back sanity, we thought, what could be more sane than a good government that makes decisions based on the well being of the people and planet? Plus, laughter (the good kind!) is certainly a boost to anyone’s personal happiness.

So off we went, to the October 30 Rally to Bring Back Sanity and/or Restore Fear.  By now, you’ve probably seen lots of photos and heard other reports.  It was an absolutely wonderful, awesome time.

And, our Gross National Happiness signs were very well received (even though our signs weren’t very funny).  We handed out flyers, and had some great conversations with a diverse group.  Estimates of attendance at the rally ranged up to @ 300,000 — and I can personally attest that it was very, very crowded — so at a certain point, we decided to pull our signs down and stop trying to walk around.  But before that point, everyone we talked to about GNH was right there with us.  Some knew about the concept already, and some didn’t, but all agreed it is an idea that makes fundamental sense.

Today, I’m exhausted.  I’m recovering from the long drives there and back, and coming down a bit from a real emotional high.  It was fabulous to be with such a large, polite, happy, caring crowd.  And it was fabulous to experience the reality that the time for GNH has arrived.  The public everywhere — from Florida to Kentucky to Minnesota, from Virginia to California, from North Carolina to Pennsylvania and Hawaii — is ready to embrace these ideas.

The Stewart rally showed me: 1) our time is now and 2) we can have fun with our movement!

In this very funny bit that went viral last year, comedian Louis C.K. touches on two key elements of happiness: adaptability and gratitude.

One of the reasons shopping is such a short term happiness fix is human adaptability.  What was new and maybe even amazing can fairly quickly become normal.  More and more stuff can never fulfill the quest for happiness, because we just get used to all the glitter and toys.

As for gratitude, many people believe a sense of thankfulness is a key contributor to personal gratitude.

Louis C.K. puts a very funny and provocative spin on adaptability and gratitude.  Plus, watching this clip will no doubt add to your happiness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

Our June 2010 conference was titled “Changing What We Measure From Wealth to Well Being” because what we measure — what we focus on — exerts a very strong influence on our actions.  That’s a core tenet in our drive to change our measurement of success from a GDP-oriented material/money focus to a more sustainable and reasonable focus on overall well being and happiness.

The concept makes intellectual sense, but over the weekend, I experienced on a very real level the power of measurements.

The experience started with the brilliant organizing geniuses at www.350.org who tabulated well over 7,000 work parties worldwide on 10-10-10.  At 350.org, they measured how many work parties were happening in how many countries.  I wanted to contribute to that total, so I organized a work party in my town to plant trees.  My town is at a crossroads of dirt roads, and gets very very VERY dusty in the summers.  More trees would help keep our houses, and clothes hanging out to dry, and probably even our lungs, cleaner — not to mention their broader role in reducing carbon in the air.

So I registered our work party at the 350 site, and made arrangements with other neighbors to go into their woods and dig up seedlings to transplant.

However, when 10-10-10 arrived, I felt rotten.  I was nursing a pulled muscle, and in the early stages of a brief flu.  I wanted to crawl under the covers, not dig up and plant trees.

But it was part of 350.org’s measurements!  And other people were involved!  I had to pull myself together and make it happen — which I did.  It was a great project, and I’m so glad we did it.  And there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I would not have gotten those trees planted without the measurement aspect.

That’s one small story.  You no doubt have your own examples!  And we can all look at the society around us and know, what we measure DOES shape our behavior.

The Gross National Happiness movement is definitely a big tent — a very big tent, since it includes new ways of looking at and measuring most aspects of most of our lives!  To mix metaphors, that means that each of us can enter into deeper study of GNH principles and concepts through a variety of portals.  Depending on your personality, learning style, and areas of interest, you may choose TED talks, economics text books, group discussions, and/or website explorations of the science of happiness.

Yesterday I was reminded of the many choices, the many doors any of us can choose to open, when two very different options landed in front of me.  First, on Facebook, was an update from the very user friendly website, Pursuit of Happiness (http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org).  I respond well to bright, colorful presentations and thus enjoy spending time at this website, which has the following mission:

• To promote the pursuit of happiness in educational institutions
  
• To promote a diversity of views on the pursuit of happiness
• To explore the ethical as well as psychological roots of human happiness
• To encourage critical thinking

Later in the day, I received this book in the mail: The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, The Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability by Gus Speth, one of the founders of the NRDC and former dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.  He’s now at Vermont Law School.  This very serious academic study will take much more attention and thoughtfulness to read and digest.  For me — and, I suspect, many of you — it will be harder to carve out the time from my busy life to give this book the focus it demands.

I will find the time, because I crave deeper understanding of not only how we got here, but how we can move forward in a positive way — and Speth’s final three chapters focus on transformation.

Those are my choices.  What are yours?  This blog and our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#!/?sk=2361831622) contain many, many choices.  Which door will you open?

As a mediator, I’ve long appreciated the deep wisdom of the immensely popular Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith.  The exceptionally well educated and prolific creator of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, 44 Scotland Street, and Isabel Dalhousie books shows both great compassion and sparkling humor as he pens addictive tales about highly fallible human beings.

Now, from my perch aboard the Gross National Happiness bandwagon, I am also able to appreciate Smith’s literate take on GNH concepts, via his brilliant but entirely not perfect fictitious heroine Isabel Dalhousie.  A philosopher and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, Dalhousie had published philosophical discussions of “the lifeboat question.”  That is, if a ship is sinking and there are not enough lifeboats to go around, how do you decide who to save?

Then, Smith writes:

“…the focus moved on from real lifeboats, which were, fortunately, manned by sailors rather than philosophers, to the earth as lifeboat, which it was, in a way.  And here the issues became very much ones of the real world, Isabel thought, because real people did die every day, in very large numbers, because the resources of the lifeboat were not fairly distributed.  And if we might feel squeamish about throwing a real and immediate person out of a real lifeboat, then we had fewer compunctions about doing those things which had exactly that effect, somewhere far off, on people whom we did not know and could not name.  It was relentless and harrowing — if one ever came round to thinking about it — but most of our luxuries were purchased at the expense of somebody’s suffering and deprivation elsewhere.”  (p.221,The Right Attitude To Rain.)

Of course, there is not a single mention of Gross National Happiness in that paragraph — but for me, it served as an unexpected and powerful reminder that our massive GDP-driven consumption comes with a much, much higher price tag than we generally acknowledge.

The Dalhousie series is always intelligent, and often quite funny.  Sometimes, though, Smith’s observations just demand serious consideration.  After his earth-as-lifeboat analogy, I have to wonder anew, how can our stuff possibly make us happy when our luxuries may well have been “purchased at the expense of somebody’s suffering and deprivation elsewhere”?

What Robert Kennedy argued so eloquently from a political soapbox, Smith writes in a popular novel: for the well being of all, we simply must put our old GDP ways aside and adopt a Gross National Happiness paradigm.

One of the things Vermonters still do, often very very well, is nurture our communities.  I know Vermont is not the only place to do this, that there are in fact strong communities all over the country.  Yet, when I travel, it seems as those communities are more in pockets, whereas in Vermont it is a deeply held, statewide value to be part of one’s local community.

That, in turn, breeds happiness.  We give, and we receive.  We’re connected.  We’re part of something larger than ourselves — all paths to a life with deeper meaning and satisfaction.

It isn’t always easy to be in community — there can be friction, of course, as well as joy.  There’s a certain commitment; each person is expected to do his or her part.  Sometimes, I just don’t want to make another phone call or finish up those deviled eggs.  But I try, because I believe communities that aren’t nurtured can not thrive.  And my community is just too precious to let it wither away.

Yesterday, along with hundreds of others in my community, I had the opportunity to see through the eyes of an outsider just how precious our connections are.  We were gathered at a funeral for Charles, a painter, ecologist, musician, professor, husband, dad, and active member of his community.  The local, non-denominational church was packed! There was much music and laughter and tears and stories.  It was a moving and special service — in large part because we were saying goodbye to a special man.

Then, a stranger stood up.  He announced, “none of you know me” before letting us know that he “came from the 50′s” — that is, he was a friend of Charles in elementary school.  The stranger lives in another state, and was amazed at the community gathering before him.  He told us that this funeral was one of the most awe inspiring events of his entire life.  He marveled at our community, and reminded us in our sorrow and celebration how irreplaceable is our love and support for each other.

None of this has anything to do with GDP.  The only thing measurable might have been the eggs and cooking baking supplies we purchased for the potluck reception, and the gas for those who had long drives. But it has everything to do with GNH.

Happiness at a funeral is neither an oxymoron, nor an accident.  In my town, it is a reality built on centuries of people making the choices to give to their neighbors.  Nobody paid me any money to make deviled eggs yesterday, but today, I am far richer than I was two days ago.

Many of you are probably familiar with Gretchen Rubin, author of the highly popular “Happiness Project” blog (http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project) and the New York Times best selling memoir of the same name.  Gretchen’s work is highly personal.  After all, her number one rule is, “Be Gretchen.”

In other words, Rubin’s work is no guidebook for the Gross National Happiness movement.  However, Rubin provides a terrific illustration of a basic GNH tenet: What we choose to measure, matters.  A lot.

Actually, Rubin’s book is full of helpful insights.  For starters, her book and blog are liberally sprinkled with inspiring and/or provocative happiness quotes.  For me, though, the best part was the end of the book (page 287, to be exact), when Rubin reflected on what made her initial year long Happiness Project successful.

“I’d realized that the most helpful aspect of my happiness project hadn’t been (her) resolutions, or the Four Splendid Truths I’d identified, or the science I’d learned, or all the high-minded books I’d read,” Rubin wrote.  “The single most effective step for me had been to keep my Resolutions Chart.”

Well, what do you know? I thought.  She’s talking about indicators!

Rubin continued, “Making the resolutions wasn’t the hardest part of the happiness project … following through was the hardest part.  The desire to change was meaningless if I couldn’t find a way to make the change happen. …By providing an opportunity for constant review and accountability, the Resolutions Chart kept me plugging away.”

Reading Rubin’s words helped me make the connection between what can seem like a distant, academic concept — economic indicators on a governmental level — and the simple realities of my own life.  Like Rubin, whenever I vow to lose weight and get fit, I make a chart — and that chart is key to my success in reaching my goals.

Again, what we measure is important. What do you measure?