Though I might travel afar, I will meet only what I carry with me, for every man is a mirror. We see only ourselves reflected in those around us. Their attitudes and actions are only a reflection of our own. The whole world and its condition has its counter parts within us all. Turn the gaze inward. Correct yourself and your world will change. ~Kirsten Zambucka

Without problems, there can’t be solutions. If constantly recognizing problems leads to uncovering unsolvable problems, or more problems than can reasonably solved, is there a method that can be applied, or should we abandon the method and embrace the right attitude?

What if you have a knack for attracting more problems than you can solve in a day, a year, or a lifetime? Would you just let yourself sink into a weighty abyss of problems and give up? Open up the local news, read it, and try to stay positive. Put everything into your work to create a great career, but let your family needs slide. Would that be positive? Go out and party all weekend, but then expect your body to remember how well you’ve taken care of yourself 5 years later. Would you stay positive? The pressure to sink away into negativity is great, which is why it’s all the more important to think about the idea of maintaining a positive attitude, whatever comes your way, in the sense that it is cultivated in you as a good mental habit.

I have been doing a lot of reflecting on this concept lately, mainly in the idea of sustaining “positivity” as an active mode of being in my life. I’m simply interested in developing a framework for sustaining a healthy mental outlook when dealing with unexpected changes in life. Change is inevitable, so why not be prepared for it?

I am fascinated in general with the philosophy of movement and its relation to maintaining a positive attitude. The very idea of transition implies that without ends there could not be new beginnings. Some ends will hurt us, other ends we may invite. A runner invites physical pain, so that s/he can recover to run stronger. A similar relationship exists with beginnings. To start something new, it might take courage. Or it may be something we’ve wanted for awhile, but didn’t have the opportunity. The interesting thing is that nothing stops. In this state of movement, we only have the ability to actively choose to recognize or ignore the new space it has “opened up” or “filled” in our life.

When I was studying philosophy in college, the very first class I took was on critical thinking. At the time, I thought learning about informal fallacies, syllogisms, and working truth tables was just about as exciting as watching paint dry. I didn’t think that a critical method would help me solve problems better, until I found out that errors in thinking can be serious. I didn’t think it would help me in my current goal of completing a triathlon this summer. It pays to slow down, to think things through. While this class has been one of the most influential classes I took as an undergraduate, it had one flaw — it did not teach me how to fall down, dust myself off, and then get up again with the zest of an entrepreneur that stays enthusiastic despite five failed businesses. It didn’t teach me how to look at life’s problems as fantastic opportunities to begin again instead of mere obstacles I had so cleverly uncovered through critical thinking skills. Critical is not clever if it brings you down. It didn’t teach me that what I found most valuable personally, was to learn how to share the human experience with others. That a large part of this shared experience would be learning to recognize things what things are, that they will move, and that I can appreciate this movement.

Watching Ayn Rand’s autobiographical movie, “In Her Own Words,” led me to think about the structure of love, its function and its purpose. When it comes to her ideas on love, my first impression was to say she’s a cross between Nietzsche/Plato/Buddha/and an Austrian Economist. She likes being controversial –I know this woman got/still gets a lot of flack. I won’t apologize to my academic philosopher friends that hate her philosophy, though. Her ideas cause thinking, and that’s good.

Yay thinking…

Virtue as Love’s Medium

If you think of love as a business, we’re all deeply invested in it. If the business of love had a currency, for Rand it’s virtue. Rand uses the idea of virtue interchangeably with one’s values. Remember as a Russian, she’s working against the idea of state-induced collectivism. In her eyes, collectivism is just a messed up way of forcing everyone to be benevolent, outside of any rational basis than it being a dictated one. This, to her, is called altruism, and it’s evil. Instead, love should be an individualist’s endeavor. It’s from point A to point B, if and only if A chooses love for B. Collectivism would say that A must do X for the sake of the group of [A...C] merely because A is legally obligated to serve [A...C].  A state induced collectivist altruistic love is immoral, unjust, and irrational outside of loving for the sake of virtue alone. I will note, she does not say benevolence is “evil” or immoral in itself, which made me further curious as to what would be an appropriate arrangement for her to show benevolent love? I will compare her to a couple giants on love, Jesus & Buddha to see if that helps. First, check out the flowcharts above and below on collectivism (above) and her definition of individualist love (below). These were fun to make.

S

Jesus, Rand & Unconditional vs. Discretionary Love

Rand:

I cannot love, unless I love and take care of myself first. I have a duty to selfishly love myself and look out for my own interests. My love is a limited resource, therefore I must choose to love only those whom I can and wish to love. When I love someone, this is an action that’s an investment in them as a person. It is saying, I invest in you because I value the things you do, your potentiality, your character as a whole. I see virtue in the way you live your life. I may encounter someone who clearly needs love, but I choose not to love them because I do not see their virtue. They have not earned the right to my love, and that gives me a reason for them to not deserve my love. This is love as layers, in the degrees of intensity I choose. My love is a just, rational love, which includes the option to opt out of love.

Jesus:

Everyone is worthy of love; everyone deserves my love. I will spend my life seeking out persons to love and I will love everyone I can. I will freely accept love from those who love me back, merely because I know I should be loved too. I will love even those who have abused and hurt me, because they are worthy of love regardless of their actions toward me. Love is something I deserve outside of my desire whether or not to improve myself. My accomplishments are irrelevant to my value as a person. I am valuable merely because I am a human in need of God’s love. A life of virtue is one of kindness, a life lived by example. I seek to show as best I can, those that I love (everyone, without discretion) the right way to love through my example. I seek to promote a life of peace, non-violence, and unconditional care for others.

Buddha, Rand & Rational Compassion vs. Committed Compassion

Rand:

Compassion is only a moral action insofar as it is benevolent. I use benevolence to mean a rational-investment-love-action done by a freethinking individual, not imposed by a government or dictated force.

Buddha:

Compassion is non-emotional. It is a commitment and a duty outside of my degree or lack of degree of empathy for a person. I choose to be compassionate to those who need compassion, in as much capacity that I am capable of giving.

And Now for Some Really Big Thoughts

I think Rand shows a great deal of respect for the individual in developing a system of morality that has as higher priority for the self, one greater than than any other philosophy I’ve come across. I think she gets a bad rap for being anti-caring or anti-benevolent, but a closer investigation leads me to believe this is not the case. Her idea of benevolence is a selective, carefully thought out one. She is determined to create a way of valuing love transactions in much the same way as we value money economically, except that our love-money is in terms of our ability to assess virtue value. The love she gives simply means more to her when carefully chosen. I think that’s a brave statement to make because if we are a loving person, giving love can be relatively easy to do and retracting love can be extremely painful. It might be easier to commit ourselves to a life of love like Buddha or Jesus did. Love in general is a tricky business, even when we’re not concerned with retracting it.

In my reading of The Fountainhead a couple years back, I had a hard time believing her philosophy was a cold/elitist one void of benevolence. The characters she develops are so full of human passion, love, desire, and disappointment that I think she had a very firm grasp on the human condition and was merely trying to create an idealistic solution to her very own personal human experiences. Her writing is philosophical-poetic – she is a beautiful novelist; a woman who clearly spoke her ideas with conviction and with a well-channeled passion for creating change through the life of the mind.

A great example of her writing came at the end of the video. I will include it here because it’s pretty:

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Cover via Amazon

In reflecting on the 9/11 events, I found a connection with a beautiful passage from Tolstoy‘s Death of Ivan Ilyich. I haven’t read much Tolstoy, but this passage struck me as particularly relevant. It reminded me that as we often busy ourselves in pursuit of the “perfect life,” however we define that, we can easily forget to remember our own mortality. Even the deaths of others around us may not seem entirely real, because it is not our own. Recognizing the finitude of life, though, is our constant reminder that we should structure our existence as best we can while we are alive. We should make a concerted effort to separate what we value most from what is trivial–a separation which allows us to focus on what matters most and not make a big deal out of things that are not such a big deal. 

In the passage, Ivan lays dying on his death bed thinking about a syllogism he previously never thought to apply to himself. The idea of accepting death, a concept once so foreign to him, is now more relevant than ever. He writes:

“Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and will all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.”

“Nothing ever is, but all things are becoming. All things are the offspring of flux and motion” ~ Socrates (in Plato’s Theaetetus)

Movement suggests change exists.

To realize that most things exist not as static things, but as a series of changes is much more realistic than the idea that since we are comfortable, nothing should ever change. We may have worked long and hard to get comfortable, so it frustrates us when things change. Each day we work on a project, set a goal, go to work, or take care of a loved one, we engage ourselves in the possibility of change.

Movement allows us to accept change’s presence and focus on its merits.

Change has an immediate and long-term value. Immediately, we are pushed outside our comfort zone. It jolts us into knowing that our sense of comfort is unrealistic. We must then re-examine our situation, reassess what must be done, and set a new course of action. Change’s long-term value is the cumulative tolerance for any change that arises.  Once we learn to be open to a consistent awareness of constant change, our movement’s exposure to it better conditions us for it. It’s like picking up a new skill or running a marathon — it will be harder your first time or if you’ve never studied that skill before, but you get better with practice over time.

If you are moving, you know which direction you’re going.

A growing familiarity with the strength of our tolerance for change gives us the ability to reflect on the changes we’ve experienced. If we look close enough, we may see our direction of movement as giving us pliable layers of ways to organize our further movement. In a sense, it’s like seeing where you’re going, as if on a map. For example, if you tried to reach a goal, but it didn’t work out the way you had planned, you can spend time re-tracing the movements you made. You can then either rule out all movements you made as incorrect going forward, or you can just throw some out, or you can take parts of the steps you made and see that they might need to just be re-sequenced differently. Perhaps the outcome you had wasn’t the result of several incorrect movements, but it was one move you made incorrectly, or all the movements but just in the wrong sequence. In any case, our movement never tells us to stop, it merely shows us where we’re going. The frustration we have happens when we believe we have failed to stay comfortable. But there is really no such thing as failure when you keep moving.

 Things that never move, can’t improve.

Experiencing change freely as something real and inevitable allows us to develop a deepened tolerance for it in all circumstances. Maintaining the perception of “complete order” as movement happens can never be the case. Imagining a static existence is only real within an isolated, unmoving state. To move, to create, and to be successful in the world, we must tolerate change as something real and inevitable. If our tolerance becomes strong enough, we learn to categorize and reflect on our experiences, creating an organization of our movement that is beneficial to us. Based on this reflection, we improve as we continue to move. Most importantly, our experiences are unique to us and valuable since they always contain the specific contexts in which we had them. The necessity of change as we move ourselves into it should then be viewed more like a gift than a burden, since every opportunity for it is ours in a unique way. It is in this unique context that we can learn to thrive though experiencing growth, reflection, and creativity.

It was as if Hume’s demi-gods chose their party, one mile wide and six miles long, without cleaning up the aftermath: photos of children growing up tangled in sewage, baby doll legs strewn around asbestos fragments, cars thrown like basket balls, steel gas station frames bent to the ground, tree branches snapped backwards like twigs, tree trunks peeled down to their naked core and decorated with tinsel in power lines. (For more photos, see here.)

This was the closest way I could experience losing everything without losing anything

Individuals with polarized ideologies from everywhere united in kindness to help. It was overwhelming. This was clearly a community of hope swirling inside someone’s worst nightmare.

This community was not the only bustling focus, though. I had to be mindful that this was not my Joplin, but someone else’s. I realized that if there is a mechanism to keep one’s vulnerability in check, a tornado’s force is not one of them. The residents’ willing acceptance of my intrusion among their uninvited disarray of things left me with nothing but gratitude.

The most cutting and unforgettable experience I had was looking someone in the eyes and asking to help, someone who had just lost everything, and learning to listen to their response of complete silence. I knew he didn’t have to speak to me, a complete stranger. But he said so much without words. I could only understand partially, though my curiosity had me wanting to feel what he knew at that moment. I thought, what would I say to a stranger if I could experience what he had just experienced? Would I freeze in despair if everything I knew came to a halt without my intention? Would I ever be able to let everything go all at once if it wasn’t my choice? What would my things mean to me now as they are tangled among me and I sat looking at them, selectively decimated? What thoughts would go through my mind if a stranger come onto my property and asked to help, but everything as I once knew it was already gone?

I learned that everything outside of us is not in our control. We may want it to be, but the way things overlap as they are may or may not coincide with our desires or hopes, especially the ones we hold onto tightly in our minds. The most valuable action we can take is to carefully choose our own reaction from within ourselves as we watch the things changing about us. It may often seem as if we are standing inside a tornado, and everything we once knew is torn away from us.

Joplin reminded me that every day I am alive I am not stepping into someone else’s dream. I live in a world of uncontrollable forces. I will act sometimes in ways I did not expect, but I can always choose what I think is the correct reaction. We are all vulnerable to having the same hand Joplin received dealt to us.

We must remember that our life and love is not a joke when all is volatile; Our choice for right reaction may be our only consistency when we are jolted into a keen awareness that the force of disaster could strike at any given moment.

It’s useless to think of ideals as anything other than what they are: just that. There are times when we continue to get hung up on them. I mean, seriously hung up. We just can’t let whatever it is that’s bothering us go.

What is beautiful to us? What represents completion? What would be our justice? We begin to set our expectations so high to achieve these things that it becomes asymptotically out of reach, and then we just give up. We must be wary, or we may crumble into nothingness. We will find ourselves just sitting there, without meaning.  Metaphysical arguments aside, I should say I use “ideal” loosely in the sense of striving for a goal or engaging in a process toward achievement, and not as a physical entity.

We simply cannot get hung up on our ideals because what is beautiful or complete to us in the ideal sense is not that important. It’s not as important as the process, simply since the ideal isn’t immediately useful. To engage in life, and I mean YOUR real and ugly life staring you in your face, you must often move forward without a perfect sense of what is to be done. Our “work” toward our ideals becomes that dynamic force created through our process to master the rules we set for ourselves. We are actively choosing to play the game so to speak, the game does not play us. And this game-playing has so much more value than the ideal itself. Forfeit our striving action, then what use are your ideals? Do you just want a bunch of ideals sitting around in your mind looking great?

Incomplete things have plenty of beauty, and that has so much value. If you look closely, most things are actually this way: a sort of mottled and beautiful mosaic of half-perfect. That is just so beautiful. And we must remember our opportunity for justice is right in front of our faces every day, albeit not the ideal, but we can still know that ideal and pull on the threads of it as if it were a thread on a Guignol puppet, one at a time. That is again, so beautiful. The imperfect is a transient, continuous, dynamic force. It grounds us to life, not the ideal.

“There is an ideal standard somewhere and only that matters: and I cannot find it. Hence this is aimlessness.” ~T.E. Lawrence

Remarkable a woman as she was, Eleanor Roosevelt published a tiny masterpiece entitled, “You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life.” In a nutshell, this book gives her compelling analysis on timeless problems confronting women and how to overcome them.

This is the third portion of an article series covering each chapter topic of her book. In these overviews, I present the most important points she makes and a little of my own interpretation. While I continue to glean a lot from the book personally, I also thought it would be a good idea to share my thoughts publicly. I first discovered the book while streaming though articles over Women’s History Month.

At 203 pages, it’s small, but don’t let size fool you. It’s powerful and instructive. So much so, that each chapter deserves recognition in its own right. Having said that, one exception for me is the last chapter on political life – a place where I have much less in common with Ms. Roosevelt, so that won’t be covered here.

It takes courage to face yourself and to acknowledge what motivates you in the things you do. (63)

Self-knowledge balances us. If you can’t face the truth about yourself, it’s impossible to have sympathy or regard for other people, period. To illustrate, Ms. Roosevelt describes her struggle of dealing with excessive praise in her activities, and that if she hadn’t had an adequate understanding of herself, i.e., that her elevated status was merely a result of combined circumstances, such excessive praise could have inflated her sense of self enough to make her obnoxious to other people. Self-knowledge keeps you real – it’s the benchmark for knowing what fanatical praise is versus an unconstructive critique. It grounds us when we might be otherwise swept away into oblivion. It is absolutely essential for anyone wishing to engage with others in any type of public sense. She notes further, engaging in self-knowledge discovery doesn’t imply unveiling scary horrible things. After all, there are good things lurking in all of us – those things are the “inner strengths” and should be our main focus.

Maturity gives a better realization of the inner strength that can be called upon, of which one may be quite unaware. (65)

“Inner strength” is what we find within self-knowledge. “Inner strength” is merely the denial of the phrase “I can’t,” and replacing what you want to be doing with “I can” or at least “I can try.” She warns against not only NOT using our “untapped ability” here but the harm we can do ourselves by never tapping into it. After all, how can we know what our inner strengths are if we’ve never taken the time to know them? Step 1) Know your inner strengths. Step 2) Use them. It’s time to get up close and personal with, you. You don’t want to be stuck not using what you don’t know.

Knowledge of how little you can do alone teaches you humility. (65)

The extreme scenario where we can imagine “losing everything” just to see how we might initially respond is an important state of mind to use in desensitizing oneself. Imagine everything you hold dear, gone. Vanished. Poof. Could you survive? You should at least be able to feel as if you could. I recall the feeling of sitting down in my first apartment out of college, alone. That was the first time a feeling of “aloneness” really hit me. It was great, but scary. I’d argue Ms. Roosevelt is actually alluding to the importance of a sense of autonomy. We get attached. But no matter how attached to anything, whether it be spouse, children, friends, job, etc. one has to be ready to accept autonomy and know the ability to stand on one’s own feet is a real and viable option. Indeed, it is humbling. On the other hand, you may realize you can do much more than you initially thought.

Maturity means an ability to take criticism and evaluate it. (71)

Criticism that’s not constructive has no value. Taking constructive criticism head-on gracefully, even if it may not be pleasant, is an important skill. Constructive criticism is a valuable thing to receive because it is such a difficult thing for someone to give directly. In the same vein, it’s important to be able to channel our attention away when we are subject to malicious criticism. In my experience, criticism has always been a challenge to handle well. I think it’s due to having too much pride, because it never ceases to come as a surprise. I have learned to appreciate this more over time, however, since it opens many new ways to growth. Ms. Roosevelt makes some valuable points in this section because she is right: it’s difficult, but it’s a mark of maturity to accept well-given criticism.

Maturity means realizing what you value most. (72)

Realizing what you value most is the culmination of a mature person. Acknowledging what you value is a way to understand what you want out of life. You’re acutely aware of your own strengths, weaknesses, your ability to retain humility, and you can decipher and absorb criticism well. You should be able to answer the question, what brings you the most satisfaction? To this, Ms. Roosevelt has an interesting answer of her own:

“My satisfaction is not in politics or the other interesting things that I do. It is in being with the people I am fond of and feeling that in some small way I can make life happier or more interesting for them, or help them to achieve their objective. To me that is much more important than anything else in life.” (72)

I have a lot of possible ideas, but I’m still working on a well-formulated answer of my own. I imagine it has something to do with learning to love those I already love better, with accomplishing professional goals I have set out for myself, and being content with my other various life circumstances. I’ve got work to do.

I’d love to know your answer: What do you value most out of life?

A strong feminist is one who responds to the history of women the way a man would.

Is that statement true? Perhaps in a sense, but it’s not clear cut. To be understood by men, it’s important to know how to communicate like one. However, a feminist view that requires a male-like communicative understanding at the expense of a woman’s feminine qualities is, well, detrimental. But what is male? What is female? What on earth do those two concepts actually mean?

The idea of a “strong feminist” or “strong [insert cool, heroine-type female role here]” is, among other things, the ability to communicate across genders well. Women have been addressed by men in books, articles, etc. in a historically incomplete way, due much in part because, well, the ones speaking about women were men.

Let’s not forget it’s only been relatively recently that women can now do such things as vote, receive birth-control, own property, get a college education, and obtain a divorce and rights to their own children upon a divorce. Feminists didn’t intend to end up the ones with the bad rap as “male-hating” activists. Many, myself included, are not. It’s just that as far as conventional and legal statuses were concerned, women were never in a place to address themselves to men in the feminine sense, and be understood by men, until now. So, re-considering how female statuses and legal rights evolved historically is a viable pursuit for today’s feminist. If you still don’t believe me, take a look at just a couple of harsh but now rather antique quotes from some pretty important dudes in history:

“The female is an impotent male, incapable of making semen because of the coldness of her nature. We therefore should look upon the female state as if it were a deformity, though one that occurs in the ordinary course of nature.” ~Aristotle

“Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds grow up more quickly than good crops” ~Martin Luther

As a feminist with a sense of humor, I almost feel like I should frame these quotes in my office just so I can laugh at them. In fact, I do keep a very special book of Nietzsche quotes on hand when I need a chuckle, but I know he is so outrageously out of line in his understanding of women, it’s more as a satirical tribute to remind me how far we’ve come.

Indeed, men and women have come a long way, but we’ve still got a ways to go. John J. Medina, developmental molecular biologist and research consultant, is a man that empathizes with this view, and he draws attention to male/female differences in the chapter, “Gender” in his book “Brain Rules.” The research is of course statistical and inductive, and thus comes with a margin for error, but he nonetheless draws some interesting points regarding male/female differences:

• In response to a traumatic event, men tend to remember the “gist” of an experience, while women tend to remember “details” with more emotional data points. (250-1)
• Women recall more emotional autobiographical events more rapidly, and with greater intensity than men do. (251)
• Under stress, women tend to focus on nurturing offspring, and men tend to withdraw. (251)
• Women tend to use both hemispheres when speaking and processing verbal information. Men primarily use one. (252)
• Women use sophisticated verbal talents to cement social relationships. I.e., the amount of verbal content known determines status hierarchies; men establish hierarchies by giving top-down verbal demands. (252)
• Women enjoy doing things together for the sake of enjoying something together; men enjoy doing things together by ratcheting each other with one-upmanship techniques. (253-4)

I’m no developmental molecular biologist or cognitive scientist, but these discoveries sure are fascinating. My particular interest would be applying knowledge of these different points Medina mentions to the workplace. For example, if women decide to employ male leadership techniques, how will other females respond? Will men respect females like one of the men? Are they “strong like a man” but no longer feminine? Somehow in my own personal experience, these women somehow shift into the social category of un-feminine “bitchy boss,” when a male doing exactly the same thing might be construed as extremely competent.

Has this been useful to you?

Remarkable a woman as she was, Eleanor Roosevelt published a tiny masterpiece entitled, “You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life.” In a nutshell, this book gives her compelling analysis on timeless problems confronting women and how to overcome them.

This is the second portion of an article series covering each chapter topic of her book. In these overviews, I present the most important points she makes and a little of my own interpretation. While I continue to glean a lot from the book personally, I also thought it would be a good idea to share my thoughts publicly. I first discovered the book while streaming though articles over Women’s History Month.

At 203 pages, it’s small, but don’t let size fool you. It’s powerful and instructive. So much so, that each chapter deserves recognition in its own right. Having said that, one exception for me is the last chapter on political life – a place where I have much less in common with Ms. Roosevelt, so that won’t be covered here.

Experience all you can, as deeply as you can (3).

Your actual experiences are not so important as how you choose to experience them. For example, the anxiousness you feel to complete that next elaborate adventure tomorrow is not so great for you if it subtracts from the depth of what you could be experiencing now. Or perhaps, if you find yourself dividing your day’s plan into lists of lists of lists, ad infinitum, until that list of tasks cannot be completed in a day, it begins to beg the question of meaningful experience entirely. Ms. Roosevelt explains this idea of “experiencing experience deeply” in drawing on early memories of travel with her father. She reflects on how something as simple as his throwing in a penny while standing on the edge of Vesuvius with her as a child can incite wonder and excitement for a lifetime. She also describes how walking through a civilization’s ruins with someone you love, as she did with her father, can make an entire history of people come alive to you. Ms. Roosevelt chides us: there’s no excuse for passing through your experiences with haste, as you experience them, if you’re not experiencing them as deeply as you should.

Learning means a great deal more than formal education (4).

Formal education can provide tools to learn, but how and why we learn what we do is our own responsibility. Knowing yourself and how you learn plays a vital role as well. Learning comes from many sources: some are from education at home, at school, but also from life itself. Most importantly, some of the best-learned lessons come from the least intellectual sources. Life as it is experienced in the most real sense can be an inordinate mess, but it’s still our job to learn how to learn life. The challenge in continuing to learn is to not only think about things from every angle possible, but to attribute what it means to you in a meaningful way. Sifting through your own intelligence, you can take ownership of what you know.

Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth (6).

The most valuable quality we can retain as adults is this: curiosity. It makes every encounter a challenge; it keeps life alive for you. Don’t let it fade into oblivion. Children we know are capable of teaching us the most intelligent thing there is to know: how to remain active and dynamic in a positively innocent way. This is curiosity. A child’s curiosity is the skill that looks at new things with a sweet objectivity, never failing to encounter it with a paling zest that we, as adults, can at times struggle to keep alive in ourselves.

Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back (6).

Life “goes back” when getting stuck in a status quo–it’s the refusal to grow through what you’re experiencing. We can move forward, though, if we learn to draw on the tools of learning to discover and sift through facts we discover in a meaningful way. It’s the mind discipline we’ve developed, i.e., how we’ve learned to learn, that is the culmination of an educated person. With that skill, you can now dig out the facts you need, to accomplish what you need with them. You can go through life in a meaningful way based on what you’ve learned, and life continues to thrusts forward—most importantly, you continue to grow through learning.

What counts in the long run is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused by you in reading (9).

Education cannot accomplish what you can produce with the tools it has given you. It’s fully up to you to find ways to fill gaps in the knowledge you have; it’s up to you to use what you know to acquire other things you need to know. Anything we’ve learned previously can be made useful. And it’s surprising to find, the stuff our parents made us learn that we were perhaps not so enthusiastic about initially, can be of great benefit later on. Ms. Roosevelt speaks of her acquisition of French skills, a skill required of her by her parents, and how that became instrumentally and enjoyably useful for her as an adult. At base, her French skills provided a minimum level of curiosity for languages in general, and for cultures not yet discovered. Little did she know she’d be traveling the world one day speaking French and reading French novels, and transferring her way of learning language into an acquisition of Latin skills. Her way of learning to learn through knowledge of a different language, allowed a springboard for her to sift into other areas she found beneficial for her life circumstances and interests.

The following article is a piece by Dr. Anna Alexandrova, assistant professor of philosophy at UM- St. Louis. She has kindly allowed me to re-publish her article regarding whether children do, in fact, make us happier.  She works in philosophy of science, especially of economics and psychology. Her particular interests are in the role and status of formal models in special sciences and in measurement theories of happiness and well-being. As a philosophy graduate from UM-St. Louis, I was very happy to find this article. Thank you Dr. Alexandrova for letting me re-publish this piece, it’s certainly a great honor!

Having just handed over my five-month-old to the babysitter, I am sitting at my computer wondering whether children make us happy. Before my son was born I asked many people whether having children brought them happiness. Unsurprisingly most said ‘yes’ without any hesitation (those who didn‘t were just being humorous, I am convinced). Now that I am a parent myself, I agree completely. My son has made me a happier person overall.

But according to some psychologists this is all a grand illusion. They claim to have scientific findings that prove their point – children decrease our happiness, and all intuitions to the contrary are mere rationalizations. A committed empiricist, I take science to be the best source of knowledge about the world, but I also know that scientific data require interpretation. So let‘s see on what basis psychologists draw this conclusion.

In a 2004 article in Science, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues presented data about 1000 Texas women who re-corded their emotions through various activities of the day. Researchers then calculated the level of positive versus negative emotions corresponding to each activity. It turns out that taking care of the children ranked below socializing, shopping, eating, praying, sex and even watching TV; it ranked just above the least pleasant activities of the day such as working, commuting and doing housework!

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert in his bestseller Stumbling on Happiness draws the seemingly inevitable conclusion – we might think that children make us happier but they don’t. And he helpfully explains why this sounds so outrageous and counter-intuitive to most parents. The first reason is cognitive dissonance – when we voluntarily invest much time and effort into an activity we tend to think that it must make us happy. The second reason is our biased memory – asked to reminisce about our life with children we remember first and foremost the most intense and the least typical moments. Thus one moment of utter bliss makes us forget about the hours, days and years of sleeplessness, worry and fatigue. The third explanation for our illusion is that having children crowds out all other activities. Since taking care of children does not have much competition (especially for parents of young children), its comparative pleasurability is bound to be overestimated. These are three reasons why we may be so reluctant to agree with Kahneman‘s findings.

And yet is this the most plausible interpretation of the existing data? Is the impact of children on happiness adequately measured by comparing how we feel while taking care of children to other activities? I see a few problems. First and foremost one might deny that happiness is adequately measured by the balance of positive and negative emotions. Aristotelians among us may insist that happiness is an objective state, not a subjective feeling, and it requires doing the right things for the right reasons. Being a parent can be one of those right things, and if so, achieving happiness is partly a matter of learning how to be a good parent. On this view we don‘t know enough about the subjects of Kahneman‘s studies to draw conclusions about their happiness.

However, even without resorting to Aristotle, we might question whether relatively low positive emotions while taking care of children really warrant the conclusion that children do not bring happiness in a subjective sense. Granted that taking care of children is one major activity involving them, but it‘s not the only one. Children also feature in their parents’ socializing, eating, shopping, exercising, resting, etc. One of the happiest moments in my life as a parent is thinking about my son while I am working or before going to sleep. So he is a source of positive emotions even when I am not

currently taking care of him. More generally, any parent knows that having a child colors everything else they do: the way they relate to their partner, the way they work, the way they see other people. Sometimes these changes are positive! So at the very least, Kahneman’s data are insufficient to measure the impact of children on happiness simply because they do not capture other ways in which parents can derive positive emotions.

Still, psychologists have a point: even if having children did not make us happy we would have much trouble admitting it. I‘d better go relieve my babysitter before I think much more about it!