figure out whats important

A friend of mine who doesn’t have a car called me today to see if I could give him a ride home so he didn’t have to walk the four miles in the rain. I actually had to head out that way to get my allergy shot so it came at a really good time as I could help him out as well as get my shot. I would’ve done it for him regardless.

This evening I received a call from a lifeline agency. My grandmother has one, but she’s recouperating in a nursing home two hours drive away, so I had no idea why they would be calling me. The woman I talked about a couple entries ago regarding “independence” had fallen again, and her lifeline company called me directly. I of course said I’d go help, and went right over to assist.

Having people that you can call when you need help is definitely something important. These people are more than just friends though, they’re also caregivers. Not all friends qualify. There are friends that I would call if I want to go have a good time, but they aren’t the same friends I would call if I was stranded with a broke down car or need bailed out of jail or to help dispose of a dead body.

I upset my dad this week. He had called me at work and started off with his normal joking comments. I wasn’t in the mood for it, but tried to ignore them as we talked about different things that I wanted to get done on the house I’m buying. My parents live next door and I had asked dad to work with the electrician to ensure that what I wanted done would be done since I’m two hours drive away. Dad and my great uncle though have been discussing all kinds of projects with the electrician who also is a carpenter and the guy that I’d hired to replace the roof earlier this summer. These are things that I’ve considered doing down the road, but it quickly became apparent on the phone that my dad and great uncle were trying to railroad all these things to be done now. I made the statement, “I’m beginning to regret asking for your help.” That immediately closed off all communication lines between dad and me, and he handed off the phone to mom and left. I tried to explain where I was coming from but he wouldn’t come back to the phone.

I wrote dad a letter then explaining my position. I also shared with him how the stress of working two full-time jobs and not getting enough down time has me on edge all the time. (I never would’ve taken the second full-time job back in January if I knew that my other job would keep getting extended. I had a scheduled term date of January 31 2009, but now it looks like I’m at least going to be still here through the end of this year.) I was open and honest with him, letting him know that I love him but that his normal joking pushes my buttons in ways that I can’t stop at this time. I also let him know that I don’t appreciate him bringing my great uncle into the decisions about my house, and that I wanted him kept out of it.

He emailed me back today thanking me for the letter and letting me know that he’s going to try not to add to my stress. I know that he’s still going to add to it, because that’s his nature. But I also know that at least now when I snap at him, he’ll know that it isn’t necessarily him that I’m venting my frustrations about.

“We are tempted to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. The other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning. But to live only for meaning—indifferent to all happiness—makes us fanatic, self-righteous, and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion.” —Chris Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

about the VIA Survey of Character Strengths (http://www.viacharacter.org/Classification/MoreOnStrengths/FiveKeyStrengths/tabid/116/Default.aspx) that says that of the 24 strengths included in the survey, five have been found to be most strongly correlated with life satisfaction. And of those five, two (zest and optimism) were dead last in my results. OK, so one (curiousity) was third. And the other two were ranked 11 (ability to love and be loved) and 15 (gratitude), so right about in the middle, i.e., not very highly ranked.

So what does this mean in terms of my ability to lead a meaningful or satisfying life? I’m not sure yet. I’ve only just discovered this whole literature on “positive psychology.” In my typical nerdy way, I want to read up on this as a problem-solving approach. (No doubt reinforcing a totally worthless character strength like love of learning instead of one I need but am weak on, like gratitude or optimism.) For instance, who knew there was an academic journal called Journal of Happiness Studies?

On the other hand, I’m starting to feel that maybe there’s too much spin on “feel good” rather than “meaningful.” For some reason, as I was looking around to see if the Journal of Happiness Studies was available online for free somewhere, I remembered the Bertolt Brecht quote that Silvio Rodríguez reads at the beginning of his song “Sueño con Serpientes” (English translation of Silvio’s Spanish of Bertolt’s German—who knows what’s lost in translation):

“There are men who struggle for a day and they are good.
There are men who struggle for a year and they are better.
There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still.
But there are those who struggle all their lives:
These are the indispensable ones.”

So, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology or Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder?

From the VIA Survey of Character Strengths here http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/
(which I discovered thanks to the post by besidequietwaters)

Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
Thinking things through and examining them from all sides are important aspects of who you are. You do not jump to conclusions, and you rely only on solid evidence to make your decisions. You are able to change your mind.

Love of learning
You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.

Curiosity and interest in the world
You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.

Fairness, equity, and justice
Treating all people fairly is one of your abiding principles. You do not let your personal feelings bias your decisions about other people. You give everyone a chance.

Bravery and valor
You are a courageous person who does not shrink from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain. You speak up for what is right even if there is opposition. You act on your convictions.

There is a woman here who is living with MS. She’s been having problems the past month where she has fallen and is unable to get back into her wheelchair. Her 85 year old mother is unable to help her either, and apparently some of the caregivers are incapable of helping her too. So the ambulance personnel have been having to go and help her.

Thursday morning we were dispatched and even though I wasn’t on call and was tired, I went to assist her. She was on the floor beside her bed and had been there most of the night. She was cold and tired, and I easily assisted her in standing then got her into her bed. I made sure that she was covered up so she could get warm before leaving.

This morning the 911 center called me directly and asked if I would go help her. Today she had wet the bed and wasn’t able to negotiate her way into her wheelchair. Instead of falling, she was proactive and requested our help. I helped her into her chair and then into the bathroom. I told her I would wait for her outside and that if she needed me she could just ask. After a while I heard her struggling, and checked on her. She had been able to get herself onto the toilet but was unable to get her wet panties all the way off as she was partially sitting on them. I assisted her, then went back out to wait. Eventually she needed my help again as she couldn’t get the clean ones on that I had gotten her, and so I helped her with them by helping her stand. After putting her in her wheelchair, I helped her remove her wet top as well and put on her robe. Then I took her back to her bedroom, stripped off the wet sheets for her and got a towel to put over the wet mattress. Then I helped her back in bed.

Doing this for her comes as second nature to me. Growing up, my great aunt who lived next door to me had fallen and broken her neck. She was confined to a wheelchair after that, so when I got home from school I would transfer her from her wheelchair to the toilet. I’d even wipe and wash her if she needed before putting her back in her wheelchair. I continued this until I left for college after which she moved into a nursing home because there wasn’t anyone around who could take care of her like I had been doing.

I can understand the MS woman wanting to maintain her independence. If it were me, I would want to maintain my independence too for as long as I could. I don’t mind going and helping her. I know she’s embarrassed by it, and no matter how much I assure her there’s nothing to be embarrassed about she’ll disagree, and that’s okay. That’s part of being independent too.

Ithaca by Constantine Cavafy

“Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.”

http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/ithaca.html

Another thing I came across serendipitously today while surfing:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/15-things-kurt-vonnegut-said-better-than-anyone-el,1858/

There’s nothing like some Vonnegut to put things in perspective. I should probably reread Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five soon.

“It is also important to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn, become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. We must then transfer some psychic energy each day from tasks that we don’t like doing, or from passive leisure, into something we never did before, or something we enjoy doing but don’t do often enough because it seems too much trouble. . . .

“It is not enough to strive for enjoyable goals, but one must also choose goals that will reduce the sum total of entropy in the world.

“How can we find a goal that will allow us to enjoy life while being responsible to others? Buddhists advise us to ‘act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.’”

From Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Psychology Today, July 1, 1997, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199707/finding-flow

I know I’ve taken something like this years ago, with somewhat different results. In the top 4 places are

1. Privacy
2. Independence
3. Humility, responsibility, concern for others (all tied for 3rd)
4. Creativity

After that, the rest of values on this survey are pretty much tied at an average score or are ranked below average.

This time I noticed, though, that you’re asked to rate items based on how much they motivate your behavior. I know, for instance, that money-seeking has influenced my behavior a lot more than it used to, but does that really mean that I value financial security more than I used to? Or, for instance, I used to give blood regularly, but since we’ve moved, the new blood center has less convenient hours and my work/commute schedule is longer and less flexible, so does that mean that “concern for others” is less of a value?

I understand that values are best measured where the rubber hits the road, and a person’s willingness to overcome an obstacle to achieve something is a good indicator of how much they value that end. But the extent to which the real world and actual events conspire to enable or prevent certain outcomes has certainly got to be a factor as well. For example, while I know that “independence” and “creativity” were high on my list years ago, I don’t think “humility” and “responsibility” were even blips on the radar. I think those are things it took my life’s experience to learn to appreciate.

And it also is clear that the attributes one values interact in ways that aren’t necessarily clear-cut. For example, wouldn’t my value of “creativity” operate differently in my life than it does for someone who ranked the values of “achievement” and “spirituality” where I rate “concern for others” and “responsibility”?

I suppose what I can see clearly is that the teeter-totter has tilted more toward realism and away from idealism. And that, I think, is probably a concrete result of age of experience. What I think I’ll go ponder is whether that actually changes my values, or whether it simply changes how much effort I’m willing to put in toward some values, having better experience to judge the most probable outcomes.