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Physics
of Happiness
Reading “Expect Chaos” by Vanessa Rush Southern [from This Piece of Eden (Boston: Skinner House, 2001)]
I used to think life could be counted on to be stable. It was my parents’ fault. They carefully engineered my world to send just that message. My evening bedtime was the same. The bag lunch my mother packed every day was basically the same. The way my father did my hair every morning was one of two very predictable styles. Every day, without fail, there was someone in queue outside school to pick me up. Things moved along with amazing certainty.
A predictable life does a child good in many ways. It makes the world feel safe. It frees us up to concentrate on important things like school work and figuring out who we are. Yet, I’ve come to see that life, unlike the routines of my childhood, is not predictable.
A few weeks ago I found myself saying something I had said many times before: “When this chapter/snag/transition is over, life will begin again.” My husband chimed in from the corner of the room to say, “Haven’t we been saying some version of that for five years now?” Indeed, we both realized, perhaps we’d been duped. Perhaps this is life. Perhaps change is life. Frustrations and snags are life. Maybe instead of being taught to expect stability and predictability, we should have been taught to expect chaos or at least constant transitions and snags; we should have been told that turbulence in the air is the norm, not the exception. Keep your air sickness bags close, ladies and gentlemen, this ride will be shaky.
The theologian Sharon Welch was interviewing women managers a few years back, trying to find out what approach made some more successful, gave some more professional longevity. What she found was that the women who survived and thrived in their jobs were the ones who didn’t take chaos personally. The women who thrived were the ones who didn’t think they had failed when things went “wrong” at work. Instead, they were the ones who came to work asking, “What will it be today?” and then looked around to find out what “it” would be.
Physics tells us there is chaos in the cosmos, in every atom, in the wanderings of every electron. Why should our existence be any different? So, here is our new life philosophy, or at least part of it: Expect, watch for, and embrace uncertainty; dance with the madness of the cosmos, not against it; leave your door open and your heart ready for anything. In this adult world, it may be the only way, not just to survive what is inevitable but to thrive in the midst of it.
Sermon Susan, Leah and I were all at the local hardware store last week to get some gardening supplies. While we were there, I walked over to the wall where the plumbing fixtures are displayed and, as has been my routine lately, I considered purchasing a new faucet for our bathroom sink. The existing faucet had been leaking…ever so slowly…for months. Not long after it started leaking, I discovered that the previous owner had installed a substandard faucet. In order to fix the leak, I would need to replace the entire thing. A job I did not look forward to. So even though I had made it a regular practice to walk by the faucets on my visits to the hardware store, I had continued to delay the inevitable. When I have free time, the last thing I want to do is wrestle with plumbing, for you see, I may be many things to many people, but I am a handyman to no one.
This day in the hardware store, though, I had that surge of spring energy that maybe many of you are now experiencing…that burst of “can-do” spirit that gets so many of us locked into projects that just a few weeks earlier we never thought we would attempt and once we have begun we sometimes we wish we hadn’t.
After Susan and I selected the faucet that we thought would best match our bathroom, I walked over to one of the employees for some last minute instructions. Many times I had counseled with this particular helpful hardware man, a wise fellow with the weathered face, and I had found his advice to be reliable…at least when I could actually comprehend what he was telling me.
Much of the lexicon of home repair is like a foreign language to me. I know enough to ask the question, but oftentimes not enough to understand the answer. When I ask questions in a hardware store, then, it is a lot like the time when I was in Paris on a college trip and needed to find a metro station. I pulled aside a grandmotherly type and said in my most earnest attempt to speak French, “Ou est la Metro?” Before I could revel in my pride that I had actually asked an intelligible question in the native tongue, my kind helper responded with a torrent of Francais that was way beyond my capacity to comprehend. I answered the only way I knew how. I smiled, said “Merci,” and went on my way, no closer to finding the subway than I had been before I decided to put to the test my three years of French class. Quel dommage!
In the hardware store this day, however, I did not feel lost. My hardware guru quizzed me on the tools I owned, assured me that I wouldn’t need anything else other than what was in the kit that came with the faucet, and wished me luck. Before my little family began our walk over to the register, though, he offered one last bit of advice…advice that would come to haunt me. Advice directed at Susan, but meant for me as well.
“Now this is just a ten-minute job,” he told her, “so don’t let him milk it.”
Later that day, buoyed by the guru’s confidence in me, and with at least twenty minutes of free time, just to be on the safe side, I set to work. I opened the box and pulled out the instructions. They seemed simple enough. Maybe this would be just a ten-minute job. As I began struggling to take apart the existing faucet, one piece after another, I experienced a familiar sense of dread. Was I in over my head? I felt like a character from a fairy tale who must embark into the dark woods, with only bread crumbs to mark the way. With every piece I removed, I knew that I was venturing further to a place of no return. Every few minutes I ran into another complication and another reason for me to mutter questions to myself like, “Why doesn’t this piece come off? Why did the previous owners do it this way? Will I ever be able to get the old faucet out?” And the scariest question of all, the one that strikes fear into the heart of all handymen like myself who aren’t so handy: “What will I do if I can’t?”
Before long, the ten-minute job had stretched to well over an hour. Each time I stood up to regroup and determine my next step, I could catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the sink. My cheeks were flushed and sweat had begun gathering at my brow. Echoing in my head were the words “just a ten-minute job…just a ten-minute job…” punctuated with an occasional “don’t let him milk it.” If there is a God, I’m hoping she will forgive me for mumbling a few suggestions for my helpful hardware man that day.
Even as I inched closer to my goal, achieving moments of success despite my fear or confusion or ignorance, I still doubted if I would actually get the work done. From downstairs, I could hear Susan on the phone playfully sharing the story of the hardware man’s advice. “He said it would only take ten minutes and he’s still up there.” I’m sure she figured I would think it was funny, too…and, if I had been able to see the absurdity of the whole thing instead of my unmet expectations I probably would have. The problem was, however, I couldn’t…and I wasn’t laughing.
Eventually, I got the old faucet out and the new faucet in. I just needed to make one more trip to the hardware store to pick up a few hoses. My guru had left for the day, but his stand-in pointed me in the direction of what I needed. I came to the checkout line, where a teenaged clerk rang me up, asking me how my day was going. “It will be going a lot better once I get this job done,” I told him in a defeated voice.
He nodded and chuckled quietly to himself. “Yeah,” he said. “Most people say that when they come here.”
“They do?” I replied.
“Oh yeah…especially when they are working on plumbing,” he answered as he bagged my supplies.
I pulled out some money to pay, thinking of the hardware store in a new light, as a place of inspiration and salvation for lost do-it-yourself-ers like myself. Kind of like a church for the un-handy.
He continued, “we’ll see most people three times in a day when they are working on plumbing.”
What an education in life this young man was getting working at the hardware store. What wisdom he was receiving. Wisdom such as
--Things are rarely as easy as we think they should be.
--Many times a job isn’t done well, until it is done three times.
--Plumbing is a pain.
--Things might be easier if we would maintain our sense of humor.
Suddenly I felt some pride in what I had done. I would only be making two trips for this job. Who cares if I took more than ten minutes to complete the work? I only needed two trips to the hardware store!
I arrived back home lighter on my feet than when I had left. The burden of my expectations that I should have completed my work in ten minutes had been lifted…for I could see that they had never been realistic for me in the first place. When I finished the job and showed my work off to Susan, I no longer cared that I had taken two hours to do a ten-minute job. I also didn’t care that I had nicked the basin…or that the faucet we picked out didn’t match the other fixtures very well after all.
I didn’t care because I was now applying Harvey Kliman’s “unifying theory of happiness” to my life and all was well. Who is Harvey Kliman you ask? Well, I’m not exactly sure, but I know he’s from Woodbridge, Connecticut and that he wrote a letter last fall to the New York Times Magazine [September 21, 2003],in which he offered a formula for happiness. H = (R X F) – E
Which translates to
Happiness = (Reality X Flexibility) – Expectations
As the formula suggests, my state of mind about my plumbing work did improve when I let go of my expectations and focused more on being flexible with the reality as I found it.
As I have thought about this formula for happiness I have considered its applications in other areas of my life. Certainly the first six months of parenthood have provided plenty of examples of the wisdom of this rule. In fact, in my experience, any expectations I might have for what Leah will do should be disregarded from the get-go. For example, just because she hasn’t slept all day, doesn’t mean she will want to sleep at night. Just because she likes to come to work with me today doesn’t mean she will want to come tomorrow. Or just because she just dirtied a diaper doesn’t mean she isn’t waiting to dirty another one a few minutes later. She will sleep when she needs to…be willing to travel when she wants to…and dirty her diaper when she must, not when I expect her to. And I suppose this is how it will always be…when she is six and sixteen and beyond…though I do hope she will be potty trained by then. Therefore, in parenthood, I think, each of us has two primary options. We can invite a perpetual state of frustration by assuming that our children (or even our parents for that matter) will always meet our expectations, or we can try to be flexible and let go of the expectations of our children…or our parents…that have more to do with us than with them.
I don’t think the need for me to adjust my expectations of my infant daughter is much different from my need to adjust my expectations of anyone I know. Indeed, the only person over which I have any real control is myself…and even that is debatable. But I can more closely approach that zen-like state of calm satisfaction by doing my best to multiply my reality with flexibility and subtract all my expectations other than uncertainty…I can invite happiness in all the do-it-myself moments of life, whether they involve plumbing, parenthood, or anything in between, by being present to whatever comes my way, to, as this morning’s reading suggests, “watch for, and embrace uncertainty; dance with the madness of the cosmos, not against it…[and] leave [my] door open and [my] heart ready for anything.” Anything…that is. Not just the good stuff, but the leaky sinks, the never-ending trips to the hardware store, or the lawyer or the doctor, or the cemetery, or the memories of the triumphs and failure that make us who we are…the laughter and the joy as well as the painful, unexpected blows that make this life we share the challenging tightrope walk it is.
Welcome to it all, I say.
On Mother’s Day and in all the days to come.
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