Jimson Weed and TheGreatSomethingOther
I ran across an advertisement for the Yale Happiness course while I was in Florida in June. Anyone can take this course for free online. It is a social experiment of sorts, one that has become the most popular course in the history of Yale University. As a nerdy type who loves coursework, I signed up immediately. This course is quite a journey, and along the way, students learn about a number of exercises—gratitude, meditation, getting enough sleep, acts of service for others, exercise, eating healthy, making valuable connections with others, savoring, or as most of us call it these days, being present in the moment. One exercise in particular stood out to me, though.
It was called the VIA Institute Personality Assessment, a fairly involved survey to find what makes us most happy in life. The notion behind this is that each of us has innate character values or strengths and that capitalizing on these is what leads each of us to happiness. In other words, there is no real “One size fits all” approach, but more of a tailored prescriptive list of activities unique to each individual’s happiness. It reminded me of the famous Love Languages test, but in this test, instead of learning how I express love for others or how they express love for me, I was learning a love language I unknowingly and instinctively speak to myself every day…or perhaps, don’t speak to myself enough.
When I got my results, I was not surprised to see the following top five list of what makes me happy in life, starting at the top with the one that brings me marginally more joy than the other top contenders:
My Signature Strengths:
Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence: Transcendence—Noticing and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in various domains of life, from nature to art to everyday experience.
Kindness: Humanity—Doing favors and good deeds for others; helping them; taking care of them.
Leadership: Justice—Encouraging a group of which one is a member to get things done and at the same time maintain good relations within the group; organizing group activities and seeing that they happen.
Curiosity: Wisdom—Taking an interest in ongoing experience for its own sake; finding subjects and topics fascinating; exploring and discovering.
Love: Humanity—Valuing close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated; being close to people.
By participating in each of these activities for a little while each day, one’s happiness grows. Having put this to the test for several weeks in a row, as instructed in the course, I can report that it is a hugely successful approach to living a more fulfilling daily life. When I saw that my number one source of happiness, that the number one character trait that feels the most me, the one that is what I come home to when I come home to myself, is an appreciation for beauty and excellence, I felt like I should have already known this. As I began going through the practice of making an active effort to participate in activities that qualified these strengths and journaling about them, I realized just how much my soul needs fed, particularly by nature, but also by art. And at some level, I have always known this. I certainly knew it as a child, before the world and all of its nonsense and hullabaloo tried to steal away my childlike wonder.
When I was growing up on Lake Lawrence, I was the first one down to the water and the last one to come in at night. I used to take the canoe early in the morning to the lily pads to watch as the morning sunshine woke up the white, pink, and purple water lilies, and they opened into a colorful canvas of floral morning stretches in the dewy summer sunshine. I took in sunsets on the sandbar twenty yards off of the end of our dock and drank them in like my soul was parched, standing still with the sand under my feet and the water up to my ribs, arms outstretched, my hands resting gently on the glassy surface of the water, eyes gazing up at the sunset, trying to memorize it.
I learned to play four instruments, but my favorite was piano, and I could put on headphones and practice and get utterly lost in the melody of a song I was learning. I remember feeling the piano sounds in the hollow spots in my chest, like the music was bouncing around and filling the empty spots. I took photographs like my life depended on it and rarely showed them to anyone, despite organizing them tediously in albums filed and organized around my bedroom. I sat for hours and wrote—poems, stories, slices of life. In college I fell in love with Paul Klee’s artwork and the poetry of EE Cummings and would spend hours lying in the grass on my college campus pretending to study while I leafed through books about both. I had no idea WHY I was drawn to these activities. To be perfectly honest, having grown up in southern Indiana where artsy types are not exactly celebrated, I mostly just thought I was weird.
Then my daughter was born, and I began to see the same qualities in her. She loved art from the moment she entered the world. I don’t remember when she began painting and sculpting and drawing and creating things, but I know by the time she was five years old, our house was full of her original artwork. As a result, I was not surprised when, for her fifth birthday, I told her we were going to Indianapolis and that she could choose a special place she wanted to go. I suggested the zoo or the children’s museum; she asked if Indianapolis had any art museums. So for her fifth birthday, we went to the Indianapolis Museum of Modern Art. I worried she would get bored and want to take off and skip out to one of the other suggested adventures, but her little creator’s heart was on fire for that museum. She walked purposefully and attentively from painting to painting. She stood and took them all in, some with her eyes narrowed, others with her little head tilted. She had dressed in her favorite purple floral printed sundress, and her curly red pig tails bounced when she skipped from one room to the next. She looked a little bit out of place, standing before paintings, taking them in, all three and a half feet of her.
Then, in one really special room of the museum, I looked over and spotted her a short distance away. She was standing in front of Georgia O’Keefe’s “Jimson Weed.” I walked over to join her. She was silent and so, so still. I stood quietly next to her, taking it in. Then I felt her look up at me. My eyes met hers, and I realized she was crying. Her little lip was trembling slightly, and she had tears pushing to escape the corners of her eyes. Her voice was shaky when she said, “Mommy, is it normal to cry sometimes when you are looking at something that’s really beautiful? I don’t feel sad, but I feel like I need to cry because it’s so pretty.” My heart nearly leapt from my chest. I choked back my own tears. “Yes, honey, that’s normal. Some people feel really big feelings when they experience beautiful things.” This explanation seemed to satisfy her, but I knew that her love for art, for wonder, for connecting with and taking in beauty, that these big giant FEELINGS would be one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking parts of her existence in the world.
About ten years later, four days after Christmas, Taylor and I were in Indianapolis with all four of my sisters at my dad and stepmom’s house. I don’t know who suggested it, but one thing led to another, and I drove Taylor, along with my sisters, Emily, Cameron, Isabel, and Paige, to the Indianapolis Museum of Modern Art. At one point during our visit, I watched quietly as Taylor disappeared into a room to reunite with her old friend, “The Jimson Weed.” I snuck in and watched from across the room as she stood there, in nearly the same spot she had stood ten years earlier, and I stared in awe at the reunion of these two old souls—Taylor and the Georgia O’Keefe painting that broke her heart wide open and let all of the light in that afternoon on her fifth birthday. I left her alone, though I snuck a photograph of her before joining my sisters and leaving Taylor in her own holy moment of communion with what feeds her soul, what feeds my soul, that connection to beauty that assures our hearts with a whisper that we are all a part of one another, of love, of beauty, of TheGreatSomethingOther that sometimes reaches out in silent conversations to touch us and remind us of the miracle of it all.
I think this is the reason that artsy types so often struggle in our modern world. The feelings are just so feely. Today I understand that the only way to make all of those feelings more manageable is to engage in activities that let me feel them, because I have learned that feelings are, in fact, for feeling, but sometimes I feel like I need a vacation from all of my feelings. Sometimes those feelings are heavy and exhausting, and not only my own, but other people’s feelings, too. It’s one of my favorite parts of life, and it’s also been my worst enemy. Because finding the balance and placing the right boundaries is a constant lesson I have to learn over and over again.
On that same personal virtue/happiness test that brought all of this important information to my immediate view, I also learned that my lowest score was in self-regulating my own emotions. This, of course, was not something I had to take a test to know. Most people who know me know that I have a fiery temper and a sharp tongue. My love for my people is fierce, which can come off as abrasive and rash. But those who know me well also know that sometimes I look at my dogs, and their little faces are so cute that I burst into tears. My sisters preface every card they ever give me with, “Meghan, please don’t cry when you open it, okay?” And they have come to expect that I am going to shed tears, probably a lot, when we all get together and then have to say goodbye.
A few weeks ago, my husband came home with an extra Bobe’s pizza, which I decided to take across town to surprise my daughter and her friends with, but on the way there I passed a homeless man sitting alone in the dusty August evening on a bench he had covered with cardboard and shaped into a makeshift bed. I stopped, gave him the pizza, chatted politely for a minute, then drove home and walked in the front door with tears streaming down my cheeks. My husband said, “Oh my God, what happened? Why are you crying?” Quietly I said, “I stopped and gave the pizza to the homeless man on the bench downtown.” And that was all I had to say, because my husband understands my big emotions, even when they are sudden and unexpected, and even at those times that they don’t make complete sense to him.
And even though the Yale happiness test nailed my number one strength, and frankly, was spot on with the other four top strengths, as well, I think the test has missed an important point, which is that the lowest score on the profile, my ability to navigate and self-regulate my own emotions, is closely tied to that first and highest character strength. It is BECAUSE the beauty in the world shatters me into pieces and puts me back together, sometimes in the very same moment, that I struggle to regulate emotions. My other greatest character strengths are all tied to that, as well—the desire to be kind and help others, the penchant to organize and lead people for causes close to my heart, the predisposition towards education, towards learning and curiosity, and the need to love my humans, the need to make a home and fill it with love, the need to be a soft spot for my people to land—all of these are what I must fill my life with in order to feel happy, joyous, and free. But at the same time, in order to do that, I’m constantly walking around in the world like a mighty exposed nerve ending, a live wire, vulnerable at all times, wide awake and in awe, constantly feeling all of the feelings. And today, I’m finally okay with that.
