How Less Freedom Can Make Us Happy: The Story of Shavuot

What makes us happy? It is different for different people. But there is one common attribute to ALL the things that make us happy – our attitude and perception toward what is happening.

It’s Shavuot, the time when Jews around the world rejoice in the receipt of the Torah.

Image from betamshalom.org (Pinterest)

I took a JLI (Jewish Learning Institute) class about it, and the teaching rabbi pointed out that before the actual receipt of the Torah Jews already knew it prophetically and kept commandments  - not because they had to, but because they wanted to. It was voluntary, out of the love and devotion to God. But once we had received the Torah on Mount Sinai, Jews became obligated to live according to the God’s law. In other words, Shavuot marks a loss of freedom. And isn’t freedom one of the most precious values for many civilized societies?

This invites the question: Why would Jews happily give up their freedom and celebrate it every year?

By the way, it still happens today. A major example of willingly and happily giving up our freedom is marriage. Why do we do that? Especially today, when the society does not require it any longer. How should parents explain the merits of marriage to their young sons and daughters? (Honestly, I’d love to hear your opinion about that.)

The rabbi proceeded to explain that the fact that God decided to mandate the Torah commandments means that it was very important to Him, otherwise He would keep things the way they were. And God entrusting this important task to the Jews makes us significant to His plans, important and special.

Image by Daf (Pinterest)

That is why it is celebrated – because every time we remember it, we also remember that we are special to God, and it makes us happy.

And that is also how a marriage works. It is a way to show to our beloved person that they are so special for us that we are willing to limit our freedom and take extra responsibilities for them, and they – for us. It is a declaration of love and significance.

When we have extra responsibilities, such as having to keep commandments, do our share in marriage, etc., we have the choice of perception. We can lament the loss of freedom, and feel gloomy or angry. Or we can focus on our significance, specialness, and loving relationships, and feel powerful, enthusiastic and happy!

This week, every time you do a chore, practice feeling happy about it by focusing on why you do it, whom do you do it for, and how it makes you special in the way you affect the lives of others!

Happy Shavuot!

More practical tips on how to become happy here: http://goo.gl/LNLUrd

Happiness the Jewish Way: 

A Practical Guide to Happiness Through the Lens of Jewish Wisdom

A Parable About Happiness or How to Be Joyful When There is Not Much to Be Joyful About




art by  digitalinkcs

 

To be happy, we need to keep the positive attitude. To keep the positive attitude, we need to disregard the negative and focus on the positive. That sounds rather easy for something as monumental as everlasting happiness! Especially, if the sun is shining, everything turns out the way we need it to, the dreams come true, and everyone around is genuinely nice.

Unfortunately,  it often rains and snows, nothing turns out the way we planned, dreams take unexpectedly long  to come true, if ever, and everyone else around is also having a tough time with life and has neither time nor desire to shower us with affection.

We can’t delay feeling happy until everything will get better. That can take a long time. So meanwhile, how do we to stay positive and even happy in face of the everyday life with its never-ending challenges?

Here is a slightly exaggerated example on how to tune out all the negativity and concentrate on the good things, even when things are not so good!

 

A Parable About a Boot

It was springtime. The birds were chirping cheerfully. The sun was reflected in puddles everywhere along the old muddy road. A man walking on it had looked rather scruffy. His shirt was old and torn in some places; his pants were greasy and had patches, his hat was of an indeterminate shape and color, and what's more, he had only one boot on! He was walking with a spring in his step, whistled a tune through a missing tooth, and smiled broadly at another man who happened to walk towards him.

The other man was a regular man. He was dressed normally. He was hurrying alone on his business. He looked respectable. He was disgusted with what he saw.

art by JamieLeigh

“Oh, come on!”, he screamed to the disheveled man, because he just could not stay quiet, “oh, would you look at yourself! You are dirty, you look like you slept in a field somewhere, and your clothes are all muddy and torn! Why on earth are you so happy? What is there to smile about? And oh, look at this, your only boot is torn, and you’ve lost your other one!”

The other man smiled even broader: “Oh no, I haven’t lost it, pal! I’ve found it!”

Turning Dreams Into Reality - Positive Thinking Workshops for Kids

I am so excited and happy! Thanks in part to this blog, I was invited to do positive thinking workshops for kids at a local community "Y"!

The event is sponsored by PJ Library (http://pjlibrary.org/), an organization that provides free age-appropriate books with Jewish-themed values. 

So I decided to pick one book for every workshop, read and discuss it with the kids, and follow that up with a fun project related to our topic. I finish with a "homework", such as smile when you wake up tomorrow, or don't forget to thank mom for breakfast.

So far I did two workshops.

For the first workshop, I've read a book "Joseph Had a Little Overcoat". It is a great book on positive attitude. It is about a small village man called Joseph. He had a beautiful coat which got old and tattered, so he made a jacket out of it. As the jacket got older, he made it into a vest, then a scarf, a tie, then a handkerchief, and finally, a button. But finally even the button got old and eventually got lost. Could he make something else from nothing? Why yes, he wrote a story about it.

This particular story lends beautifully to discussions of positive attitude, such as:

- the power of smile and good mood (which Joseph carried throughout the book)

- the power of positive thoughts - instead of becoming sad, Joseph saw an opportunity

(also having an open mind, dealing positively with adversity, resilience)

- accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative

- optimism

- we do not need a lot of things to be happy

- satisfaction with what we have

- just like Joseph could come up with a story from these events, we can always get positive attitude and good mood from anything.

- personal hygiene - to be happy we need to be healthy, and keeping clean and neat is one way to do it.

- enthusiasm (not be lazy)

- take control of your life (do not wait for something to happen, make it happen as much as you can)

-resourcefulness (how to make "lemonade" from a "lemon")

- gratefulness - appreciate what you have

Of course, it would take hours to go into all of these, so I discussed Joseph's positive attitude, and how if something unpleasant happens (like when Joseph's clothes got old and torn), we can always think of something good in this situation and smile.

I had 4,5,6 and 8-year olds and everyone participated and shared what made them happy (which, predictably, included gifts, and unpredictably, gymnastics and soccer lessons).

The homework for the kids was to get up in the morning, smile and be in a good mood!

For the second workshop, I chose to discuss such an important concept as gratefulness. For that, I read a PJ Library book "The Apple Tree's Discovery".

Together with the kids, we have discussed all the things we can be thankful for. First on the list were gifts, new things, and conveniences, such as being able to take a car to school instead of the school bus. Slowly but surely we arrived to less tangible things, everyday things that we often take for granted, things we forget to be thankful for, even as grown ups, such as the sun, the nature, our talents (for example the ability to draw beautifully or excel at sports), and of course our family, friends, and even the fact that we are alive!

We've also discussed that even if we get something we do not like, e.g. Mom gives us veggies for

lunch instead of pizza :), we still have to remember to be grateful to Mom for the effort.

I tried to make a distinction between a mere politeness in saying thank you automatically and actually noticing all the good things and feeling sincere gratefulness for them.

We followed the lively discussion with a drawing session accompanied by the song "Grateful" by John Bucchino. The kids drew what made them feel grateful. The pictures ranged from a toy to the child's family to summer!

The homework - to remember to thank Mom for the breakfast tomorrow.

I hope the children will be a little more mindful of positive attitude and gratefulness now, the seeds that will flourish into happiness when they become teens and adults.

Does Happiness Require Settling?

Once I heard a parable about a poor man lying under a banana tree eating a banana. Another man comes up to him and asks,

- Where have you gotten the banana?  

- Plucked it from the tree. 

art by ~DicklessHunter

- Well, you could pick a few bananas and sell them.

- What for? 

- With that money you could hire someone to help you pick more bananas, and sell them, too.   

- What for? 

- In a month, you'd be able to hire 10-15 people picking bananas for you, selling them, and making a lot of money... 

- What for? 

- Well, then you would be able to lie under a tree, eat a banana, enjoy the life and do nothing! 

- But I already do!

Indeed, having a more easygoing attitude is a powerful shortcut to a happier life. It is liberating to realize that we do not need much to be happy. That being happy is being peaceful and content with life at all times and all junctures.

We go through life surrounded by infinite details and choices. Our mood and happiness depend on myriads of daily conscious and unconscious decisions about what we focus on and what we let go; which desires, possessions, events, and battles do or do not deserve our emotional investment.

So it may seem that since happiness does not really depend on external factors, we should not desire them. Why aspire for success or career when we can be happy without? Why bother creating a family, compromise and sacrifice our freedoms, when it will bring us as much aggravation as bliss, especially if ultimately we should not rely on anyone else to make us happy except ourselves? Why do anything when we can just work on cultivating peacefulness and contentment?

Even our values seem to be in the way of happiness. "Would you rather be right, or would you rather be happy?" This seemingly unassuming and seemingly obvious question hints at a univocal choice: fight to be right or settle and be happy.

It sounds that the way to happiness is to take whatever happens to us without challenging, giving up on our dreams, ambitions, beliefs and values.

In order to be happy, do we need to settle?

We will get trapped by this question, if we try to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer:

art by ~conradyoung

Yes! We need to settle. If we are not as happy as we want to be, we need to change our attitude, we need to change ourselves. If we take everything to heart, if we let all the stuff that goes on rankle us, if presence of problems and absence of solutions anger or depress us, we will get nowhere near happy.

On the other hand, no! Our values, desires and ideas make us who we are. We should not sacrifice our integrity! Being happy may be much more important than being "right" in a petty argument. But what about major issues? Is being happy more important than fighting for our ideals, our ideas, our loved ones, our freedom, our rights, or our values?

Besides, even if we would rather be overall happy, would we be able to disengage from the things that are important to us? It may be rather easy to let go of non-essential things. But when the choice comes to deeply ingrained values, many tend to insist on being right.

So what's the solution? This is a tricky choice. As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

If we throw ourselves too much into either direction, we would be forgetting the other essential cornerstone of happiness - moderation. Without moderation every pleasure turns into suffering (see post Happiness vs. Pleasure), bravery turns into stupidity, loves turns into smothering, and the pursuit of happiness may turn into settling, indifference and apathy. It works the same way for the other extreme. If we do not let go of anything, take everything too close to heart, always fight to be right, we risk being miserable, emotionally wrecked and exhausted for the rest of our lives.

We need to sustain the right balance for absolutely everything we do, including contentment (see post on moderation).

It is important not to confuse contentment with complacency. Contentment does not mean inactivity. Being content does not mean settling and never wanting anything else because we are satisfied with the way things are. It means recognizing that even if we are not satisfied with what we presently have or what we presently are, it is sufficient to be grateful and joyful on the road to achieving our goals.

To get into this state of mind, we need to find the right proportion of not caring too much and not caring too little.

Taking a look at the life through the prism of our present understanding of happiness will put our goals in perspective. We may realize that some things we yearn for or fret about are not as overall important as we are used to think, whereas the meaningful things will remain meaningful.

The appraisal of what is meaningful is very personal. Some may want to impact the world, eliminate hunger, or invent flying cars. Others may want things that impact them personally, for example, see their kids graduate from college or quit smoking.

art by ~mole2k

So the compromise is to recognize which goals and ambitions are not essential for us and let them go, and which are important, and aspire toward them. But happiness is not an either/or proposition. It does not appear when we follow our dreams or when we settle for what we have. We should not put it on hold until we finally reach our goals. We should combine the desire to change something and the contentment with the present situation while we work on the change.

Surely, once we achieve our goals and turn the dreams into reality, we will be happy. But as often, our efforts may not come to fruition. The end results of our struggles may not be what we wished for. We should be ready for this outcome as well. Not getting something we want, even the noblest goal, should not disturb our mental state.

The happiness I discuss is the contentment with the process of life itself. The perspective, the balance of not completely giving ourselves over to some goal or idea, and not giving up on it entirely, either. It is being happy while working our way to it, and staying content and balanced whatever the result is.

So happiness is an intricate balance of being both content with what we have, but not settling or giving up on our dreams.

Look forward to your life. Know what your goals are and work to reach them. Just continue to be happy in the interim.