By Michael Timm
There's something about ascending particular stairwells that lingers vividly in my memory.
The stairs I climbed the very first time in Puno, Peru, heart racing from the altitude. Never before had I been winded simply walking up the stairs—but life at 3,000 meters will do that to someone whose lungs have developed along the shores of Lake Michigan. Those stairs were nothing special, simply poured concrete with one landing, but they occupy a unique place in the architecture of my memory.
I remember too the crooked stairs I climbed the first time in Oxford, England, sweating, lugging my luggage up the steep and narrow wooden switchbacks to my dorm, exhausted after spanning the Atlantic, but with much more oxygen than Peru. With each step, I was primed with the expectation of newness, prepared for a greatness not entirely my own, borrowed from those who had gone before me in this same space and shared with those I would soon meet from many other places.
My mind also still reserves space for those spiral stairs with the wrought-iron railing in Ripon, Wis. I don't remember the very first ascent, but indelible is the imprint of the many times going up and around that curve in the Harwood Memorial Union to the College Days newspaper office—assuming command, taking care of business, bearing the editorial board pizza or a bundle of papers warm from the press.
These stairwells remind me of the happiness of accomplishment. They mark out phase transitions in my life. Other stairwells have left important impressions as well, and I think it's partly because stairwells are not designed to be spaces where we stop and reflect or where we do deeply purposeful action. They are conduits between here and there, spaces we move through necessarily but without conscious appreciation, without the demands of an office or the comforts of home. We are becoming in stairwells, existing in states of transition. We are open.
I offer you, reader, four new stairwells to climb. Whether they lead to happiness, or turn you upside down as in an M.C. Escher print, is in large part up to you. But it's my hope that the ideas, connections, and experiences shared here will linger in those silent, pregnant spaces of your mind like a refreshing memory linked to your own process of becoming—whatever it is you choose to become.
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What is happiness and how do we get it?
Bishop Richard Sklba discusses the topic of happiness by referencing the work of Thomas Aquinas, for whom happiness was central to organizing his philosophy, and then by unpacking three Semitic terms that eventually have been translated to English as blessed, peace, and justice. The roots of these terms transcend the individual, Sklba writes, emphasizing the need for the establishment of a proper, balanced relationship between individuals and the social whole where individuals work for the common good. Sklba argues these three elements are central to a Christian understanding of happiness, which is a thing that must be practiced to be real.
When a drunk driver crashed into Jason Haas, the impact sent shattered glass into his eye, his brain into shock, and his life into pieces. Almost a decade later, he's picked up those pieces and considers himself lucky to be alive—but he reminds us of the ancient wisdom of the Greek Solon that perhaps one's happiness should not be measured at all, if at all, until after one is dead and one's legacy clear. When Haas woke up from a coma after six weeks lying in a hospital bed, he believed part of him had died. But the part that elected to seize life again has since earned a degree, participated in his community, and started a new home. Is he a happy man?
Kevin Woodcock wrangles with the question of happiness by considering some of the greatest thinkers who have produced literature and philosophy. While respecting their intellectual rigor, Woodcock rejects those whose grand themes terminate in an abyss of meaninglessness. Instead, he considers the varied interests of German Renaissance man Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In Goethe's botanical writing, and infused into his fiction, Woodcock finds an appreciation for organicism—a way of looking at living entities not as closed things but as open processes where a plant, or a character, evolves according to its own innate pattern but is necessarily shaped by and made up of all the elements in its environment. The lesson Woodcock derives is that ultimately we're still in the driver's seat when it comes to finding or making happiness. He perceives a precious inner state of consciousness—an inner Buddha—that, if nurtured and respected, will grow in the world and not be stamped out by it.
Finally, Charles Oberweiser considers the pragmatism of happiness. As a volunteer coordinator, his job is to encourage and measure happiness among volunteer workers because happiness is a valuable recruitment and retention tool (his premise: unhappy volunteers won't return to do more work). Oberweiser has observed, however, that the process of volunteering often makes volunteers happy. At the same time, he suggests that we may fool ourselves into remembering we were happy during times when we wouldn't have reported that we were happy—suggesting that happiness, if it can be measured at all, demonstrates a fair amount of plasticity.
*
In the year of my birth, 1982, Arthur C. Clarke published 2010: Odyssey Two, including the somewhat prophetic, somewhat ironic, statement, "A fin-de-siècle philosopher had once remarked—and been roundly denounced for his pains—that Walter Elias Disney had contributed more to genuine human happiness than all the religious teachers in history."
Just prior to the actual year 2010, I traveled with my family to Walt Disney World. Many of the throngs of people I observed there were frustrated, angry, tense, on edge—sometimes even manic. They had to get to the next attraction. They had to wait in line. They had to walk around in the rain in absurd plastic garbage bags. It wasn't how I would describe the happiest place on Earth.
At the same time, I observed the earnest desire of parents to provide happiness for their young children, and share in that happiness—or perhaps it was a desire to attain some happiness themselves, reliving some happiness remembered from their childhood. Nowhere was this as clear to me, nor the desire for happiness apparently as easily satisfied, as at Dumbo: the ride. I watched the Dumbo exit line for multiple cycles. Adults coming off tended to relax, their faces softened, their eyes brightened, holding the hands of mostly exuberant children—even the older kids demonstrated a positive emotional response. I think some of the adults were happy because they felt they'd succeeded—junior enjoyed the ride! This was a stairwell they could easily climb.
It's worth noting that all they did was go up in a fake baby elephant and spin around. Objectively, not much changed. You could have a comparable physical experience without too much trouble. But because they shared an expectation and an experience—they wanted to be happy and the details of the ride were simple enough so as not to interfere with the accomplishment of that dream—they created for themselves a kind of magic bubble. Their special status was reinforced by all those people on the ground waving up at them as they circled, the very center of attention but without either power or control.
In its simplicity and effectiveness, the circle of Dumbo reminds me of another circle—a delicate interweaving design tattooed on the inside of a waitress's forearm. I asked her what the tattoo signified. She said it was the beginning of a Buddhist prayer—the idea was that just by people looking at it, they could start to become better people.
What is happiness? How do we get it? Find a stairwell and climb it.
Michael Timm
23 January 2010
Milwaukee, Wis.
Milwaukee Anthropologist will next turn to the topic of democracy in the spring 2010 issue. If you have ideas on the nature of democracy—what it is, what it isn't, where's it's been, where it's going, if it's really a good idea, and if not what might replace or succeed it—query me by March 20 at platypus [dot] found [at] yahoo [dot] com.
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