Tech Cleanse

The limits of being happy

Last Friday we began our winter clubs session. Since the installment of clubs in our upper school division a handful of years ago I've cast a wide net in the clubs I've offered.

Right Brain Boot Camp
Freestyle Rapping Club
Sign Language Club
Arabic Club
Infographic Club
Ultimate Frisbee Club

This year, though, I am trying something different in establishing the UPWORTHY club.

Our first session began with a discussion of why we'd chosen to join the club. My hope was to come to an agreement of our purpose over the course of the next 10 weeks.

"I want to make people happy," one girl said.

"There's too much sad, frustrating news," another boy remarked, "and I want to be reminded that there are uplifting things, too."

Finally, another student added, "Everyone just seems so anxious...I want to help spread the idea that there is good in the world."


Each of these reasons made me grateful for the students and for the group's existence. I found it encouraging that these students truly wanted to find ways to uplift and inspire those around them. It was the first comment, though, that caused us the greatest discourse.

We talked about what it means to be happy.

Bobby McFerrin sang, "Don't worry, be happy."

Joy, in Pixar's Inside Out, blindly pursues a world devoid of problems and negativity.

Yet both of these examples present happiness as a binary measurement. You are either happy or you are unhappy.

How many other things could you be, though? With a hearty dose of inspiration from the online comic, The Oatmeal, I have thought lots about what it means to be happy in the past week. Parents often remark that their hope for their children is "that they will be happy." Yet there is something missed there. People who are engaged and passionate in the most meaningful ways tend to not be happy. But they're not unhappy, either. Instead, they are energized, joyous, exhausted, depleted...they are in pain, they are frustrated, they are driven and absorbed, ecstatic, euphoric, and on the verge of combustion.

Criss Jami, in his book (well, two books) Killosophy, writes that

"...excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial."

Is the artist, the poet, the performer, the educator, the politician happy during these moments caught in the presence of true awesomeness?

Perhaps not, but they are certainly driven. They feel a sense of purpose. They are whole.

There are so many things to feel in the world, but--as my students in the Upworthy Club began to teach me--happy cannot be made the endgame of adolescence. If it is, then people who are not happy begin to feel as though there is something wrong with them, that they carry an emotional burden, the weight of which is too great for their network, their community,

There is so much passion, so much energy, so much simultaneous hope and despair and exploration in the life of a teenager. It's unreasonable to expect them to be a single thing all the time. I often share this image with parents and students as a means of illustrating all of the ways an adolescent student is prepared to engage with the world.

Is the student above happy? Probably not. But what if they stand for justice, seek freedom, look within themselves, question authority, and tether themselves to a cause for which they care? They're smiling, yes, but they're probably a little frantic, a little romantic, and very overwhelmed.

But, then again, are people who change the world usually happy? 

I don't think so. Instead, they are the kind of people who grieve for what they know is possible, for what they believe we--as a collective humanity--are capable of becoming. In short, they are engaged. And they are struggling to explore their capabilities...they are expanding their ceilings.

In our first meeting of the Upworthy Club we weren't happy. We were a little sad, a little realistic, but we were each wholly present and honest with each other. Most importantly, we were in a room where we felt known and heard, and where we saw the future history of the difference we want to make in the hallways and classrooms of our school beginning to take shape. We were grieving for the present, and we were hopeful for the future.

It reminds me of a favorite Faulkner quote: "Given the choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief." I used to think this quote was grim, but as I consider it now, I wonder...what other choice is there, really?

Poetry

A few weeks ago I found myself in New Haven, Connecticut standing before a stack of books at my favorite used book store in the city, Book Trader Cafe. I always gravitate toward poetry when I'm in a bookstore like Book Trader. Always. There's something I just find so mesmerizing about selecting a thin volume from the shelf, leafing gently through the pages and finding a poem to read. By the time I'm done working my way through a number of volumes I almost always purchase an author's poetry.

My process, however, is a little unorthodox. It goes like this:

1. Pick a collection of selected poems by an author with whom I'm unfamiliar.

2. Read two poems.

3. If they both resonate with me, I buy the book.

4. If one of the two resonates with me, I read a third. If that one stirs something within me, I buy the book.

5. If the the first two, or two of the first three, poems fails to churn my heart or mind awake, I begin again with step number 1.

I remember buying Vice by Ai and the selected poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the Stamford Library bookstore. I discovered Hettie Jones's Drive in Salt Lake City. Winter Sky by Coleman Barks and The Complete Works of Hart Crane fell into my lap somewhere in Vermont. Hayden Carruth's Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey was at a garage sale in New Hampshire. 

Of course, some poems came my way by other means. I have my father's copy of e.e. cummings' poetry, and my wife introduced me to Tony Hoagland one winter. Jay Parini took me to the far fields with Ted Roethke and Ezra Pound, and Robert Tisdale bought me Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. Matt Cheney encouraged me to read Joel Brouwer's The Way It Happened and bought me The Poems of Paul Celan. 

Still, the first poems that won me over were the ones Karen Budde made me memorize in sixth grade: the Shakespearean sonnets ("...thou art more lovely and more temperate..."), the Emily Dickinson ("the pedigree of honey, does not concern the bee..."), the John Donne ("and in this flea, our two bloods mingled be..."), the Edgar Allen Poe ("'twas many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea...").

As a high school student I created an elective with an English teacher and an art teacher called "poetry and painting." Half the class would paint, half the class would write. When we had a product, we'd trade with someone and the second group would write a poem inspired by the painting while the first group would create a painting inspired by the poem. We did this a third time and presented the three-piece set to the community. I think there were six of us in the class and I remember one of my poems was entitled, "Hey Mister Green Faced Man, Why You So Ugly?" and one of my paintings was about burning flags and was inspired by my friend Allamary's poem, "Shadows."

It was awesome.

My English teacher, Matt Cheney, once read us a poem he wrote about the way we ruin poems when we try to decipher them. I think it was called "To the English Teacher Weilding A Scalpel."

My heart exploded for poems. And it still does. Poems are the way I make sense of the world. Sometimes, if I'm stuck in the doldrums, or I'm particularly inspired, but I don't know what to do next, I'll stop what I'm doing and find a poem.

"Sometimes you just need a poem," was a phrase my wife quickly learned in our early weeks of marriage as we struggled to learn how to live alongside each other as one.

Julia Alvarez, one of my inspirations in college, referred to the art of poetry as "putting to words what can't be said."

I've always hung on to that.

And I've written literal thousands. I still have every journal of poetry I've ever filled (except for one that tragically slid off the roof of my car somewhere between Salt Lake City and Mount Pleasant, Utah...but there's a poem waiting to be written in there somewhere). Sometimes they rhyme, other times they don't. They cover a litany of emotions. They help me put words to the things I feel that can't be said. To loss. To gain. To struggle. To sacrifice. To soaring. To failing. To growing.

Between running and poetry, I find my way to navigate, to cope.

Yesterday was parents' day at my school. Many parents were there. We've been studying the Middle East, and specifically we've been looking at the geopolitics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yesterday, though, I wanted to put a face to it...to get past the "us" and "them" of it all...to help my students see that when you have humans who feel things as deeply as they do, you get things that can't be said in words...and you get poets who are brave and beautiful enough to try anyway. So from deep within the pain of war and heartache, we explored poems together.

I would live in that classroom forever. Hearing my students with poems on their lips, their parents watching proudly, their hearts pressing firmly against the subtle wrinkle of human existence as tomorrow's history begins to rouse.

I asked the parents if they had favorite poems. Many did. It was neat to watch the parents struggle to explain what it was about the words that drew them in, and awoke something inside.

Later I watched two boys--9th graders--reciting lines from Romeo and Juliet in an empty room. The weight of the words was beautiful as I watched them. The boys took turns reciting, correcting, watching, and listening. They found joy in the lines and in their ability to express them loudly, deeply. I snapped a photo and told them I was inspired by their energy.




I wonder when each of my students will read that poem that changes them, that inspires them to look deeply within themselves...hopefully it will coax them toward the effort required to struggle some emotion of their own from the tip of their pen.

I hope, above all else, they'll realize that sometimes you just need a poem.