Mike Foley is good with words, and questions. "Who in the Western world has not been deranged by a toxic cocktail of dissatisfaction, restlessness, desire and resentment? Who has not yearned to be younger, richer, more talented, more respected, more celebrated…who has not felt entitled to more, and aggrieved when more was not forthcoming…."
He's even better when he tackles the slippery tonic word happiness. Academic study defines it as Subjective Well-Being (SWB, not joking); recent popular books call it Wellness. Foley points out the major growth in the literary genre of tragic lives and misery memoirs and notes that childhood happiness memoirs don't sell. Then he suggests a new academic discipline – Happiness Studies, which could be given intellectual heft by calling it Eudaimonics, from the Greek!
But what Foley is arguing for is not subjective well being, nor mere vague wellness. "The greatest gift of happiness may not be the feeling itself as much as the accompanying thrill of possibility. Suddenly the world is re-enchanted and the self born anew. Everything ids richer, stranger and more interesting. The eyes see more clearly, the mind thinks more keenly, the heart feels mpore strongly – and all three unite in enthusiasm, delight and zest." These three last words will recur throughout the book. They are not so much feelings as dispositions; not reactions to the world but responses to the world as it is. But in a culture of perpetual wanting, pervasive advertising, inordinate consuming, and obsession with novelty, status and image, these three human dispositions are degraded by exposure to their counterfeits.
One of the interesting areas for reflection while reading this book is the way Foley pinpoints the cultural forces which shape our spirituality by frustrating and eliminating the conditions through which we can become aware of our inner selves and the call of transcendence. "What we need is detachment, concentration, autonomy and privacy, but what the world insists upon is immersion, distraction, collaboration and company". The three disciplines of solitude, stillness and silence are near impossible to achieve. Why? Because of the new religion he calls Commotionism – which demands faithful obedience to the imperatives of constant company, movement and noise. The result is an inner exhaustion, often undiagnosed, and for which the remedies of stillness, solitude and rest are noisily drowned out by the perpetual motion of a culture in flux.
We are drowning in noise, and fear silence; speed, movement, multi-tasking, and the worship of instant, make us impatient with our own body, spirit and mind which aches for breath, space and time to be. If once the world was too much with us, now the world is too much within us, around us; and its ruinous interruptions destroy our peace, like a mobile ring-tune, its tinny, strident command for attention demolishes just that moment as the concerto pianist's fingers hover over the keys, waiting in the silence to play the resolving notes that gather together the fugitive emotions of an audience entranced by music which will take them beyond themselves and this world. Few things bring us down to earth more brutally than someone else's mobile going off at such moments of peak significance. But such crashing disappointments are the stuff of lives lived to the ring-tune rather than the soloist and orchestra.
(The two photos are of Bennachie in a late August sunset, and Inverbervie beach – two places where silence, stillness and solitude can be enjoyed with enthusiasm, delight and zest!)
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