Using ice cream to pull back the veil

There is one scenario that will always make me sad if I run it through in my head. Picture a little boy, let's say he's about 8 years old. It's a hot summer day and here comes the ice cream truck.

At the sight of it, the boy races to tie on his sneakers as his mom hands him a dollar. (Can you still buy ice cream for a dollar?)

The rest of his friends are done with their transactions and are walking away from the Good Humor truck with red, white and blue rocket ice pops, Nutty Buddies and ice cream sandwiches.

But the little boy we see from a first person vantage point races down his stoop and into the street just fast enough for the ice cream man to notice him. He waits.

The boy buys a Fat Frog or a Bubble O Bill. (They are both the same thing: ice cream with a chocolate back and a gumball for a nose.) The boy is victorious - smiling with a green tongue as the truck drives away.

As he heads up his driveway with his treat, his dog startles him. He jumps and drops the ice cream.

The truck, with its carnival like siren song, is gone. If I were a method actor, that is the trick that I would use to bring tears to my eyes. No other scene could make me sadder quicker. Not the time I failed the parallel parking part of the driver's test, not getting dumped, not even sitting in a cubicle all day selling whatchamacallits.

Why is that? I certainly ran faster and spent more money to please girls. And I certainly never felt like I missed the boat (or ice cream truck as the case may be) more than in my previous sales career.

It's as if the events of childhood and the feelings they bring pass through a magnifying glass for most of us. "Enjoy it now, kid," relatives said. "These are the best days of your life!"

Even though people of all ages are wired the same - physically experience emotions and sensations in the same way - we seem to become jaded from just being around. Our passion fades.

Psychotherapist Wayne Allen agrees that children are more "in the moment."

"That's why they can be having a tantrum one moment and giggling with pleasure in the next," he said.

He adds that people stop experiencing life spontaneously as they gain a sense of past and future.

"They begin to question their experience, its validity, and pack onto it what others have told them they ought to be experiencing and feeling," Allen said.

Judgment tempers joy and then the responsibilities pile on. Concerns over rising gas prices and car insurance payments override the thrill of driving.

Of course judgment isn't a bad thing. It's needed for living and dealing with others safely. That is why we don't want a kid behind the wheel of a car.

But we let this evaluation process take the wind out of our sails when we over-think things. That's when it reaches a point of diminishing returns.

Turning back the clock on this feedback loop isn't an option. But we can hit the reset button and recapture the joy of youth from time to time, according to Allen.

"Commit to freeing one's spirit, to fully and completely experience life," Allen said.

We have all heard about the importance of being in the moment, but being there and taking it in without worry is easier said than done.

Picturing a child filled with joy from something as simple as ice cream contrasted with the random, real world events that sometimes cause him to drop that ice cream helps me to peel away the layers and open myself up to the moment.

One of the greatest joys of my life is in jeopardy

The bi-annual Dodge Poetry Festival started in 1986 thanks to funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

The first festival drew less than 5,000 people. As word spread that number grew to about 20,000.

In January, the Dodge Foundation announced that it would not provide funding for the next festival, which would have taken place in 2010.

Poet and Dodge Foundation director Jim Haba was at the helm every time. He crafted each festival to be both “a work of art” and “a good party.”

The biggest names in poetry took part: Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Coleman Barks and Gwendolyn Brooks, just to name a few.

Just like any good party, there was food, music and great conversation. Poetry fans got the inside scoop on what it’s like to create poems, how to read poetry and the lives of poets from the poets themselves.

There were numerous venues where poetry lovers could share their own poems, take workshops or listen to music throughout the day.

But the highlight of each day happened in the main tent—a tent that could accommodate 2,000 people. Under its big top, the most amazing, logic-defying feats were pulled off with ease.

Only in this tent would it make sense for the penultimate hip hop group The Roots to be the warm-up act for a 96-year-old man who had no props, but the podium and his cane.

That man was poet Stanley Kunitz and he brought the house down that night with a poem about Halley’s Comet.

Not only did the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation cut funding for the next festival, it was also reported that Haba resigned.

Many fear this could be the end of America’s largest poetry festival.

In an effort to show people what they might be missing, (I say might because the township of Montclair has approached the Dodge Foundation with an offer to host the event) I am writing a series of columns that will feature interviews with some of the poets who came to Haba’s parties.

Coleman Barks is a poet and translator. His translations of Jalal al-Din Rumi—a 13th century Sufi poet–are the best selling poetry books in America.

Thanks to the Dodge Poetry Festival, I had a chance to speak with Barks about how poetry can make life more spiritual.

Gene: Your translations [of Rumi] remind me of Buddhist writings.

Coleman: There was a strong Buddhist influence in Afghanistan in the 13th century. Rumi’s father’s school has lotus motifs on the columns, which means that they were big into meditation. Coming down the Silk Road, Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity met and produced this very beautiful, flexible form that Rumi worships within. He did not divide people up into religious groups. He sees everyone as being part of a single family.

Gene: Have you been to Afghanistan?

Coleman: I have. In March of 2005 the State Department sent me over there.

Gene: What was that like?

Coleman: It was exciting! I didn’t know where I was—meaning that I just didn’t acknowledge that there was danger. But there was. Everywhere that I went there was an SUV with automatic weapons in front and an SUV with automatic weapons behind and I was in the middle. It was amazing. I found myself in the Afghan Ministry of Culture reading a poem of Rumi’s and everybody in the room – all of the cabinet ministers – were saying the poem in Farsi as I said it in English. They knew that poem so well. It was a magnificent cultural experience. I’ve never been in a culture that honors poetry like the Persian-speaking world does. It feels like home to me, or it feels like the Dodge Poetry Festival!

Gene: Why is it that Americans don’t have this appreciation for poetry?

Coleman: We haven’t found the use for it that they have. It comes up in conversation. They have chunks of it memorized. That’s an unusual thing for the United States… For grown men to recite poetry to each other.

Gene: In a culture where poetry is pervasive, how does that change the culture?

Coleman: It gives them a soul place that they can meet…That is a meeting place that we don’t have.

Gene: What do you think Americans are looking for when they pick up a book of Rumi?

Coleman: I don’t know why Rumi has been so popular over the last 10 years. My translations alone have sold over 500,000 copies, which is amazing in the poetry world. As for why that has been happening, there is some kind of place where we have been lonesome for a certain kind of human being. He’s an aesthetic and he is wise and he has a kind of gentleness… those qualities come through and I think that that nourishes the psyche.

Gene: What do you think people look for when they pick up your poetry?

Coleman: Gee, I don’t know. I had a humbling realization once, numerically. Rumi sells 100 copies a day. My poems sell 12 copies a month, worldwide.

Gene: It seems like, in a lot of your poems, people are not alone. There is always more than one person in the poems. Does that go back to waking up on the cot by yourself in school? [Referring to a poem in which a young Barks wakes up alone having slept longer than his classmates]

Coleman: That kind of emptiness that I felt in kindergarten was profound. I think that friendship is a beautiful thing, but the deepest truth is that we are alone. And that aloneness is absolute.

Gene: That reminds me of a Rumi poem that you translated.[You thought union was a way / you could decide to go. / But the world of the soul follows / things rejected and almost forgotten.]

Coleman: The mystics say that love has to fail… [Rumi’s friend] has to leave Rumi alone so that he knows that the friendship is not the deepest knowing. It’s one of the great human enigmas that somehow on the other side of our love there is something that is even deeper than that.

Gene: How important is spirituality in your everyday life?

Coleman: It’s the whole thing. I love that old story about a theologically inclined bunch of fish who schooled together and discussed the possibility of the existence of the ocean as they swam in it. They divided up into study groups as they tried to figure it out… I’ve felt that mystery my whole life.

Gene: What draws you to a poem?

Coleman: I guess it’s an image that comes to me first. The first poem that I was drawn to write was about an image of laying back in a river, so that your ears are under water and your eyes are out of water. You have an underwater world that you can listen to and an out of the water world that you can see. The underwater world seems to be further away. You can hear around the bend. You can hear a motorboat coming. That way of being in two places at once is an image of how it feels to be me. I feel like my ears are underwater most of the time!

We are all passengers on a plane

It strikes me as strange that people can feel so lonely on this densely populated planet. To make my point I have an exercise for you to try. Pay attention the next time a plane flies overhead.

Let your imagination take over as the roar of the jets fills your ears. Picture the people on board and try to picture individual passengers specifically.

Who are they? Maybe one is a young magazine editor from Iowa who is flying to New York to visit her mom. See the editor in your mind as she looks out the window and down upon the Meadowlands. She is looking out in order to give the couple next to her privacy.

The couple appreciates the privacy as they reel from dizziness caused by the flu. You can take this thought experiment as far as you like. Let's say the couple caught the bug while visiting the husband’s family on their farm two hours west of Des Moines. They slept outside during their visit because she’s allergic to sheep that are often sheared in the kitchen.

In the cabin, the captain and his copilot tease each other about their divorces as they sip coffee and tend to their gauges. The captain keeps it to himself that he gets along well with his ex-wife and doesn’t tell his copilot that he’s heading to her house for dinner when the plane lands.

A rookie flight attendant brings more Cheerios to the red headed toddler who is awestruck by his first plane ride. Beyond picturing the passengers and what they are doing at the moment they are flying overhead, conjure up their pasts as well. What led them to this moment?

While the copilot had military experience, the pilot went from flying Cessnas to corporate jets before finally getting hired by Continental, a career move he now questions because of extensive company budget cuts.

The toddler is the apple of his mother’s eye and he knows it as he focuses on stacking Cheerios in the driver’s seat of his toy fire truck.

His dad focuses his camera on the wing of the plane outside his window as it slices through the clouds while his mom watches him stack one Cheerio after another. She is looking forward to showing him off to his grandma in a few hours.

This could go on and on. What are their expectations for their trips? Who will they see? The point of the exercise is to illustrate how connected the planet’s 6 billion inhabitants actually are.

Because we are wired to be social animals isolation scares us so we tend to exaggerate feelings of loneliness. The emotions that drive us to be social have an important function. But the illusion of isolation can be a nasty side effect.

Playing this game not only illustrates how many of us are at hand crisscrossing the planet at any given moment, it also highlights how much we all have in common with one another.

All parents can empathize with what it’s like to travel with a toddler. Most of us in the workforce feel the pressure exerted upon us by today’s economy and everyone could use a break from time to time.

Picturing the lives of others as they streak across the sky is a way of gaining perspective. We may not always realize it, but at any given moment, many of us are in the same boat.

What is happiness? (Part 3)

So our definition of happiness is building. It is the result of things that are external to us, like our surroundings. It is also the result of the choices we make as members of various communities. It can come from simple things like seeing a baby smile, but also from complex concepts, like justice.

Defining happiness might be the first step toward understanding it. But it might even be an unnecessary one. As my mother-in-law continued her e-mail, she told the story of my brother-in-law, Ben, when he was 2:

“When Ben was 2 or 2 and a half...somewhere in that age range... we asked him why he was always so happy. He considered the question carefully and said ‘I just decided to be because it feels better.’

“Allan [my father-in-law] and I remember that because he said it at a time of our lives when we were so incredibly busy that we didn't stop to think about topics such as our happiness. When he said that I realized that I was very happy and that part of it was the fact that I was so busy and involved and felt that I was contributing.”

What is happiness? (Part 2)

“How would you define happiness?” I asked friends and family in an e-mail...

The first reply was from my mom, “Happiness is seeing my grandson, and him saying ‘Grandma,” she wrote.

So, Mom’s definition is on par with Webster’s. My friend John is a library director.

“I think of happiness as momentary and uncertain. It is joy (a more spiritual value) that sustains me even in the darkest times and in the most painful circumstances,” he wrote.

The difference in how one defines happiness while looking at a baby’s face is strikingly different than how one defines it while looking at a wall of books.

John added an important layer to the discussion. Is happiness different than joy? The joy I write about in this column often points to more substantial events like a baby learning to walk than fleeting, funny moments, like said baby slipping on a banana peel and then landing on a whoopee cushion. But is there a difference between the two in the moment?

“This is a stream of consciousness rather than a definition but here goes,” my mother-in-law writes. “I really do believe that happiness is a state of mind and a decision. ‘Things’ give me transient satisfaction but the feeling that I am contributing to the world in some way, whether it is through paid employment or how I treat the people I meet or deal with everyday, I am happy.”

Actually, many philosophers agree that this is an integral part of deep happiness. To illustrate this they concocted a thought experiment in which there exists a pleasure machine.

Much like the movie The Matrix, the perfect pleasure machine allows people to plug in and experience whatever experiences they think will make them happy. Want to be a rock star? Poof! You’re a rock star.

The experience would be perfect. It would seem tactile and real in every way to those who are plugged in, and yet the majority of people say they would opt out. They would rather live their real lives. Philosophers believe this is because people want their lives to add up to something.

So it is more than a positive emotion about your current condition. Life only adds up to something through our toil and that means that happiness is more than being satisfied. It’s not just a situation that we find ourselves in—we have to contribute to it.

If Aristotle had e-mail, I am sure that he would love to contribute at this point in the discourse.

“Happiness would be the result of living a just life,” he’d click out on his keyboard before spilling his late night coffee across his open-toed sandals.

A just life, in Aristotle’s view, would be a life that is built on careful decisions, in accordance with one’s beliefs.

"Living a life that is loving and giving in the light of eternity," writes poet Sander Zulauf who was one of my great teachers in college.

What is happiness?

In 1825, when Noah Webster assembled his first dictionary, he defined happiness as “the agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good.”

Today, Princeton’s Wordnet Web site defines happiness as a "state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy” or “emotions experienced when in a state of well-being.”

According to those definitions, happiness is a positive emotion that is the result of your current situation.

But is it the byproduct of someone’s disposition? Is happiness something that exists against sadness?

NPR correspondent Eric Weiner also thought those definitions fell flat and decided to hunt down happiness in his book, “The Geography of Bliss.” His first visit was to Ruut Veenhoven director of the World Database of Happiness.

It might come as a surprise to you–as it did to me—but Veenhoven’s research indicates that most people in the world are happy. Weiner worried, however, that the way researchers gather data is suspect. How did they test whether or not people are happy? They asked them!

Instead of hooking up test subjects to monitors or bugging their homes, researchers simply asked people, “How happy would you say you are these days?”

Weiner was skeptical. Rest assured, Veenhoven advised, “You can’t be happy and not know it. By definition, if you are happy, you know it.”