Journeys with Emily Davidow

by Dan Austin from 88 Bikes in Peru

Excerpt from Pop!Tech blog post by Dan Austin of 88 Bikes: “The Moment of Happy”

Happiness. You can’t measure it, you can’t put it on a graph, but you can see it. Oh, can you see it. And you can feel it, too. Many of the kids who received bikes in Uganda had been former child soldiers; some had watched both parents die of HIV. Many of the girls who received bikes in India and Nepal were survivors of unimaginable abuse as sex slaves. But even in these cases, where the kids were more subdued, their understated happiness was just as evident as that of the rambunctious kids in Phnom Penh who got up at 5 a.m. the day after the Moment of Happy to ride their bikes around the center, rousing the orphanage staff with a symphony of little bike bells…

During all these travels (including 17 countries, 2 1/2 months on the road and 12 endowment sites on our just-finished Project FOUR), a thought keeps echoing in my mind: is our ignorance in addressing the desire and need for happiness for all people at the root of poverty’s pervasive grip? Despite clear research from Jeffrey Sachs and other economists that, comparatively speaking, it wouldn’t require that much to lift the caul of poverty for most; despite millions of NGOs, billions of dollars and countless courageous individuals, poverty remains, unabated.

But it makes sense: it’s difficult to get excited—and generous—about simply sustaining someone. We want to see our fellow human beings do better than languish; we want to see them progress and find fulfillment in their lives.

Perhaps if happiness were embraced as a need on par with food, shelter, water, love—the tide would turn. Not because happiness in and of itself can drill a well or sow corn or turn back climate change—but because making people happy is a mission a whole lot more transcendent and enjoyable than just keeping them alive.

Perhaps all this time the bar hasn’t been raised too high—but too low.

The 88Bikes Foundation has a very simple goal: to provide a sustainable, joyful, empowering form of transportation to young people in developing countries, in situations where these children have been challenged to be their own heroes due to war, conflict, poverty, disease, or other regional hardships.

Speaking at the Asia Society in New York on Apr. 17, Pico Iyer suggests several kinds of spiritual journeying are valid in the early 21st century, and advises against judging other people’s spiritual journeys, because, in our global age, “what you bring … is what gives meaning to any experience.” He spoke of tourists, including himself, who go to places of pilgrimage to observe the devotion of others, and return transformed. Not all journeys are equal, Iyer clarified, for only deep commitment will “sustain you and give that completion. That really is what pilgrimage is about.”

Completely captivated by the slideshow of Alison Wright’s wonderful photos of Tibet and her inspiring story of spirit and survival from NYTimes Lens Blog — Tibetan Nomads, Remote in a Remote Land. If you are too, you can join her on photo journey workshops she’s leading in China, India and Burma. Her book, Learning to Breathe, just jumped to the top of my ‘to read’ list.

In the lovely essay, Averted Vision, Tim Kreider ponders his experience of happiness in retrospect, wonders if it’s not intensity of experience rather than happiness that we crave, and concludes:

I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the “real” stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.
 

Which reminded me so much of this recent interview video with Robert Thurman featured on BigThink:

Question: What is real happiness and how do we know when we have it?

Robert Thurman: Actually, we don’t know when we have it. That’s the great thing about it. Real happiness is that which comes up right out of your own self when you let goof striving for happiness—peak sexual experience, peak meditative experience, delicious food, friendly conversation: when you forget about yourself and how unhappy and miserable you are. The drive is to do something, eat somewhere, then somehow your cells and your system and your mind and your brain—which is very sensitive, ready to perceive aesthetic experience and have a great time—is reaching out and realizing that the universe is a place of blissful energy. That’s when you’re really happy, and you don’t know it because you don’t pay attention to that. You’re engaged in what you’re doing. It could be just a conversation with a loved one; quality time. A brief two seconds between making money or running here and there— that’s what real happiness is, and you don’t know it because you don’t pay attention to it.

The minute you try to know it, and say, “Oh, how happy am I. How much high quality is this time,” you’ve immediately evaluated it. And then it is not good enough; now I have to leave 5 minutes from now, so now that ruins the next 5 minutes because I’m going to be leaving after five, and then I will start weeping instead of enjoying being together.

So the key to happiness is loving people, enjoying your life, not worrying about a lot of things, letting your mind not live in a fantasy that’s life is going to be better, and appreciating what’s in the moment. It’s a very lovely paradox. Life is very paradoxical.