TOADTalk: Gratitude 2.0

As the months go by in a Thacher school year, students and faculty members learn about each other in a thousand different ways, times, and contexts: around the breakfast or formal dinner table, in a sunshiny moment on the Pergola or a sunset shared on a trail, at the whiteboard in a classroom, lab, studio or seminar circle, at practices and games and rehearsals, at coffeehouses and Open Houses, in dorm common rooms, and in Suburbans on highways or back roads on the way to community service projects, field trips, cultural excursions, or athletic events. Then there’s each faculty member’s TOADTalk. Monday morning’s all-School Assembly launches with whatever the Teacher On Active Duty wishes to share—a reflection, a story or song, a demonstration of some sort, or a simple poem. In this way, every week of the school year, the community gains a new window into the mind or heart or spirit of one of our own. 

Katherine Halsey, whose TOADTalk is featured below, has been at the School since 1995 and teaches in both the Language (French) and English Departments. Katherine advises freshman girls, serves as an instructor in the Horse Department, and chairs the Lectures and Concerts Program. She is the mother of Comfort, Bronwen CdeP 1998, Brooke CdeP 2000, and Phoebe CdeP 2003. 

Last year, those of you who were here may remember -- I did something a little different & rather than give a talk per se, I lead a quasi-Quaker meeting organized around the idea of Practicing gratitude. Today, although I do not intend to set it up on the Quaker model again, I would like to grapple with more reflections about gratitude, and how practicing gratitude may be linked to our notions of happiness and success.

 

So, consider this GRATITUDE 2.0

 

Beyond my own, ongoing, personal exploration of gratitude, these remarks today are grounded in, and inspired by several of this year's Senior Exhibitions & a number of sustained, extra-curricular dialogues with students, particularly the seniors of this graduating class...

 

One of these students, several weeks ago, sent me the link to a TEDx Talk by a guy named Shawn Achor, whose name I did not recognize. But I have loved and learned so much from my ongoing conversations with this young woman that I hardly hesitated before clicking on the link. 

 

Shawn Achor. Funny. Smart. Provocative. His talk is about what he calls "positive psychology" and the effect of happiness on productivity ... In under 13 minutes, he deftly deconstructs the current paradigm in our culture that teaches us that if we seek success by working hard, that happiness will follow. "No," says Achor, that's BASS-Ackwards, (as Mr. Vic's and my dad used to say). According to the research Achor draws from, this paradigm doesn't use the healthy, neuro-typical brain' s natural processes to its advantage; in fact the "if-we-work-harder,-then-we'll-be-more-successful,-and-if-we're-more-successful-then-we'll-be-happier model," a model on which Achor suggests most of our teaching, parenting and managing styles are built, actually sets us up for dissatisfaction and failure to be happy. Why? Because with each success, as we meet each small goal we set for ourselves, our brain, rather than reveling in that success, almost immediately sets a new goal, one that will reflect (we think) even more success. We constantly... unrelentingly.... move the proverbial goalpost. If we get a good grade, the next time, we'll need to aspire to an even better grade. If we run that 4-minute mile, next time, we'll have to shave off another few seconds. We become obsessed with competition, motivated increasingly by the idea of being number one, setting ourselves apart from the crowd rather than nurturing connections to peers.... kind of like the guy in Ms. Mahoney's TOAD talk: nothing short of first place will satisfy us, or our brain. But, Achor cautions: "If happiness is on the far side of success, our brain never gets there."

 

Turns out this familiar, deeply ingrained paradigm is a negative mindset.

 

Achor's radical idea is this: if we increase our happiness factor first, success, in the form of greater productivity and effectiveness, will follow. In part because our brain, in a positive, dopamine-bathed state, benefits from fuller cooperation of all its learning centers, allowing us to adapt more easily and to resolve any challenges we may face without being choked by stress and fear of failure.

 

So, nurturing happiness first enhances the our mental capacities across the board, allowing us to work more efficiently and effectively, thereby guaranteeing greater success, however we may define that.

 

But, what is happiness, and how do we nurture it? 

 

It's a word we throw around often and casually, as though it's an easy concept to grasp. It's even written into our Declaration of Independence as one of our "inalienable” rights:

 

 

I have to admit, that until recently, it's not a word or a concept I thought much about. "Happy" seemed like a lightweight word and a relatively shallow concept. Happy equaled: upbeat, bubbly, carefree, not inclined to grapple with complexity or challenge. In life's more difficult moments, happy seemed associated with emotional denial.

 

And then there were the almost simultaneous gifts of Shravan's Senior Ex., Shawn Achor's TEDx talk, and an article entitled "Does Trying To Be Happy Make Us Unhappy?" by Adam Grant of the Wharton School of Business, which appeared randomly in my FB newsfeed yesterday, the serendipitous convergence of these three things to tip me toward deeper questioning and further reflection ... It's an ongoing process, but a couple of ideas I'm chewing on:

 

Happiness is more a mindset than a mood...

 

Happiness is connected to caring for ourselves. We nurture it by creating time and space to explore what feels right and good, learning to distinguish those qualities from things that feel intuitively wrong and bad. It involves trusting our instincts in this, and making a commitment to turn toward what is right and good, learning as we go to embrace what sustains the health of our bodies and our souls, our connections to each other and to the earth on which we live.

 

Professor Grant posits (what many yogis have been practicing for eons!!) that happiness is about being in the present, fully present, in the present moment ... (easier said than done on that one, I'm afraid) ... Grant goes on to confirm that we cannot quantify how happy we are: it's a feeling. But what kind of feeling?

 

Happiness is not about life circumstances and material comfort, the accumulation of things and wealth. Our external worlds do not influence our happiness as much as our internal worlds do, the infinite resources of our hearts and minds, the landscape of our souls.

 

Human happiness is also, at least partially I think, about connection to others ... recognizing and celebrating connection rather than competing with and setting ourselves apart from, and above others.

 

And here's where we bring it back round to gratitude.

 

Happiness as gratitude, an epiphany à la Milton, the 17th c. poet and polemicist who wrote that: “Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”

 

It made me smile to see that on Shawn Achor's list of five things we can do to develop what he calls our brains' "happiness advantage," the number one suggestion is to practice gratitude by identifying everyday, at the end of the day, three new things that you are grateful for. Write them down. Spend a minute to reflect on them. Do this for 21 days in a row and the healthy brain will more consistently scan the world around it for the positive rather than the negative elements in its midst...

 

So it turns out that happiness is not so much about being eternally upbeat. Practicing happiness and gratitude does not preclude the experience of difficulty or sorrow; it's more a description of how we respond to those life challenges. In my own life, I have come to a deeper practice of gratitude through unimaginable loss and recent intimations of my own mortality. It is true: we cannot control what happens to us, but we can influence how we respond to what happens. And it's interesting to observe how the difficulties on our path help bring into clearer focus the many blessings we carry with us on our way forward.

 

So, I'll leave you with this: GRATITUDE as happiness. HAPPINESS as success.

The rest will follow.