Chapter 03: Limit of Happiness

I remember thinking “

why should I even try to be happy? I’m just going to get sad again later.

” I sat slumped against a wall trying to think of any reason to justify being happy. Then something occurred to me. We don’t say the same thing about food. “

Why bother eating? I’m just going to be hungry again later.

” We get hungry, then we eat, and then we get full. We eventually get hungry again. That’s normal.

You’re going to get sad. It’s not only inevitable, it’s essential. If you were happy all the time, it wouldn’t be called happiness, it would be called normalness. It’s the same with eating. If you were never hungry, then there would be no concept of being full. The two concepts depend on each other and neither can exist without the other. And just like you can eat too much, you can be too happy — I’ll come back to that.

There are ways to manage your ups and downs to prevent yourself from feeling unhappy. You can be unhappy and not feel sad. The best news is that you can do it on purpose — you probably already know how to do it, but might have either forgotten, or not even realize you know how. As a kid, I managed ups and downs innately. Later in life that I lost that critical skill and had to relearn it. Many of us are likely in a similar situation.

As a family we’d all go to my grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving and more than twenty-five people would gather and talk and watch football. Actually twenty-four people would watch football; I would play outside with my soccer ball. The backyard was littered with what my grandmother called ‘plants.’ To me, it seemed like an organized jungle. I would dribble the ball through the undergrowth and practice going over, under or through all the various obstacles.

My dad said I was one of the smallest guys on the field, and other kids would toss me around like a hacky sack. He’d ask me after the game if I was ok, and I’d say “That’s ok, Dad. I like being a ping-pong ball.” I don’t know if that’s really the way I felt, but I know I loved soccer, I loved to run, and I know I fell a lot. Games were fun, and I remember a lot of them. Sometimes the games were easy, but other times they tested me to the point of tears.

One such day in Garland, Texas, eleven kids lined up on a grassy field. All had on long leggings and sleeves underneath their soccer uniforms — except for me. I was wearing short sleeves and shorts in 40 degree weather. We were all anxious for the game to get started. Some because they wanted to have fun, and others because we were freezing. We were standing in the middle of the field with no protection from the elements.

A gust of wind slapped my skin with small pellets of chilled water. I forced myself to stand still despite my body’s demands for warmth. My jaw muscles spasmed, but I clenched my mouth shut to keep my teeth from chattering. My thighs and calves were convulsing, so I tightened my knees and curled in my toes to keep from shivering.

I wasn’t doing this because I couldn’t afford warmer clothes — my mom even brought some for me to wear. Instead, I was training myself to be the best soccer player despite the circumstances. Before this, I had played in so much mud that even the cleats would slide around. I’d played in so much heat that the ground felt like running on bricks. I somehow thought that my superpower would be the ability to play regardless of what life threw at me.

We finally broke formation and got into the game. The weather was relentless, but so were we — and we won.

Practice was hard too. One day we’d been running drills for over an hour. It was the most pain I’d felt since I started soccer — emotional and physical. I felt like my body should have already been better at these drills, but it was still struggling. My calves felt like someone had taken a cheese grater to them, but I choked back tears and kept running.

The coach called me over and said we needed to have a talk. I figured he had seen me lose my composure and was going to lecture me about attitude — he’d have been right to do so.

“Yes, coach?”

“I want you to meet Jim. He’s a scout for a national team and wants to talk to you.”

It turned out that Jim had chosen a few players and me to try out for a national team. I was only ten years old, so I don’t know what all it entailed, but someone said that it was the road to going pro. In my mind this was my dream come true. I’d been found. The next few days I lived with a soccer ball. The thought that I could become a professional athlete was thrilling!

A few weeks later I woke up in the morning and put on my soccer uniform. As I was tying my cleats, I heard my parents talking in their room. Our rooms shared a wall, and I could tell by the tone of their voices that they were both pretty upset. They were arguing about the budget and how they couldn’t make ends meet.

“There’s no more money. Sam’s soccer is too expensive!”

I paused and listened to more of the argument as they tried to figure out how to manage the money. Mom was crying a little, and dad was raising his voice a bit. I stared into the wall for a few moments, giving my brain some space to do its thing. Then without hesitation, I got undressed, folded my uniform, and put on regular clothes. At that moment, I decided that soccer was over for me. I went and sat in the living room thinking about what I was going to do with my life. After about an hour my parents came in talking like nothing had happened.

“You’re not wearing your uniform” he noted.

“Yeah, I think I’m done with soccer. It’s pretty stressful, and I’m kind of getting tired of it. I’m not even sure I like it anymore. I want to start looking at other things.”

As an adult it’s easy to read this with a sense of loss or sadness. I didn’t feel sad at the time. I saw myself as part of a problem and wanted to be part of the solution. The truth is that it was an unhappy part of my life, but I was more focused on what came next. I didn’t have time to be sad or mourn my loss.

I never did play soccer again. Instead, I started looking for a job. I talked to the local grocery store about working there, and it didn’t sound appealing at all. I continued to talk to people around the area, but I wasn’t in a big rush — I was only ten years old.

After a few months, my mom met someone who had a small ranch some three miles from our house. She tells me that she went there to sell them Avon, and they asked her if she knew anyone that would like to work for them. She told me about the opportunity and I jumped at it. It was a chance to work outdoors, and they said it was a trial basis to see if it worked out for both of us. Having less of a commitment was helpful to me, because I didn’t have to worry about the job being perfect.

As an interview, the owner took me into the barn and pointed at a rectangle hay bale.

“Pick this up” he snatched at the binding with his fingers “and put it here.” He set it on another hay bale some five feet away, then picked it back up and put it where it was when we arrived.

“Ok…” I wrapped my fingers around the bindings and heaved, but the hay bale felt cemented to the floor. I clutched it with both hands and lifted, but my arms weren’t strong enough. So I squatted, dug my hands in, and pushed up with my legs. The hay bale bobbled in the air as I took baby steps over to the place he wanted it. I let go, and the hay bale tossed onto the other bales.

“That’ll do” he said. Somehow I got the job.

I saved every paycheck from there until I could afford a bike to take me to and from the ranch. From then on I bought all my own clothes, and I even learned to cook. My goal was to make sure that I would never be a burden to my parents again. It was cool, though. I loved being out in the open field smelling the grass and seeing all the animals. It was by far the most enjoyable job I have ever had.

My activities involved more than moving hay bales. I maintained the property, cultivated Bermuda hay, and cleaned the pond. I also got to train horses, move cattle, and even raise calves for veal. He grew vegetables, which I learned to tend as well as a flower garden which wrapped around the house. Granted, I also took out trash, shoveled manure, and used it to make compost. Part of my routine tasks was rotating a 10-foot pile of manure to keep it from molding. But I didn’t mind a little manure. I focused on the excitement of working with the horses.

Working on the ranch also made me super strong. The truck would arrive loaded with hay bales and feed sacks weighing thirty to fifty pounds each. When I started the job, I had to bear hug each of them and carry them one at a time down to the storage area. After a while I got tired of carrying one at a time, so I’d carry one in each hand. Eventually I got to where I could carry two in each hand, so at eleven years old I could carry nearly two hundred pounds, yet I weighed just over one hundred pounds myself.

It was a good job, and it gave me a lot of time to think. I spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to care for the tools, the animals, and even the earth. Sometimes I would stare at an open pasture and imagine it was a soccer field. What would it have been like if I were a professional international soccer player?

At this point I’ve walked away from a dream. Now I’m doing something that has no plan and no defined purpose. Should I be happy or sad? Is this a success or a failure? I was happy with where I was at, because it was allowing me to help my family, and because it was helping me to grow. Later in life I would need these lessons, but I would have forgotten them.

Fill a glass with water and set an olive on top of the water. The olive won’t stay there. It will sink to the bottom of the glass. Before you had let go of the olive, it was on the top and the water was on the bottom. Did the olive move, or did the water? I can prove to you that the water moved. Consider this: if you fill the same glass with ice and try the experiment again, the olive will stay on top. Ice is water that doesn’t move. Because the ice doesn’t move, the olive stays in place.

The olive isn’t the enemy. The water could have moved or not moved. The olive was foreign, and it’s easy to see it as the cause of change, but it’s not. Ultimately the water allowed the olive to be at the bottom of the glass.

I was a little sad that I left soccer, and I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t done so. But I didn’t see my family or the ranch as enemies. The ranch job was a good thing, because it allowed me to help my family. Happy things in our life are often temporary. They come in waves, which must give way to troughs whether we like it or not.

If the olive is to move down, then the water must move. However, it would be an error to start applying labels to these things. “The olive is bad,” or “the water is weak.” Rather they operate in a synergy with each other. They cooperate in order to share the same space. As a young person I understood that I must experience equal amounts of pleasure and discomfort in life. They are opposites, but they are not enemies.

If there was ever a man who could laugh while talking about a serious topic, it would be Alan Watts. Listening to him greatly inspires me as he describes the tragic pain of the universe with a whimsical reverence. He sat on one side of the table, waving his traditional pipe in the air as he gestured with his hands.

“Sound is not pure sound; it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence.” His eyes narrowed as he honed in on what he wanted to say “you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests. Just as you do not encounter in life people with fronts but no backs, just as you do not encounter a coin that has heads but no tails. And although the heads and the tails, the fronts and the backs, the positives and the negatives are different, they are at the same time one.”

The wood creaked a bit as he relaxed back into his chair and chuckled to himself “once we get into the fear that black – the negative side – might win, we are compelled to play the game, ‘But White Must Win,’ and from that start all our troubles.“

As I listened to him I realized that he’s right in many ways. Not only must we have opposites in our lives, but they are intertwined. They aren’t enemies. They are in a constant cycle of creating each other. This isn’t just a psychological phenomenon. It’s a physical one.

Certain activities cause the brain to release dopamine — the reward hormone. If you release more dopamine than receptors can absorb, you get a buzz, or a sense of euphoria. Although you might like this sensation a lot, the brain doesn’t. You see, the brain knows something you don’t. Excess dopamine can inhibit the amygdala’s fear or anxiety response. Those responses are what keep you alive.

To compensate for the defect, your brain creates more dopamine receptor sites. This is the start of a lot of problems. Now in order for you to feel as good as the first time, you have to do more than before. This is likely why Doug started escalating his activities and introducing drugs (alcohol).

If only the problems stopped there, but they don’t. With more receptor sites, your brain can no longer process dopamine the same way as before. Now you stop enjoying things that you used to. You may also find yourself more nervous or sad. You may find yourself dependent on drugs or taboo activities to help you feel normal.

This is what Alan Watts refers to in

Do You Do It or Does It Do You?

. He says that you eventually run out of new sources of pleasure, as the Roman crowds did in the year 67. The Romans were accustomed to public displays of sexuality. They considered it normal to see a gold-plated phallus paraded through the streets. Having public baths, prostitutes, and every kind of luxury, they needed something new. Nero knew that people sought something more, so he put on a show at the Colosseum to stimulate them in a new way.

He had floats circle the Colosseum with slave girls dressed up, and then released wild lions to eat them. Alan Watts explains that this is a type of hell on earth. “When you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit, the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain.”

There is a limit to pleasure, and heaven help the person who reaches it. We must experience life in a cycle of pleasure and pain, up and down, happy and sad. When you take a break from pleasure of whatever form, your receptor sites revert to normal. Then, when you experience pleasure again, it’s enjoyable again. Without a pause in pleasure, all you are able to experience is pain.

Now, there’s a trick that I knew as a kid, and forgot until much later in life. You can be sad, but

feel

happy. I know it’s a bit of a brain teaser. What you experience and how you feel about it are distinct.

Camilla Arndal Andersen did an experiment. Her husband preferred a specific type of coffee. It was expensive, so he thought it had better flavor. She was a neuroscientist and the situation interested her. So, she made a bet with him that his taste in coffee was all in his head.

“I’ll blindfold you and bring you two separate cups of coffee, and you tell me which one you like better” she proposed.

“Ok.”

He put on a blindfold, and she put the coffee on to brew. Then, with his blindfold in place, she brought out a cup and had him taste it.

“This coffee is good for the sole purpose of terrorizing the body awake by its alarming taste,” was his review.

“Very well,” she said taking the cup back to the kitchen. She returned a second time and handed him a cup of coffee.

“Now this is a coffee you can enjoy in the evening and relax,” he said with a sigh.

He didn’t know it, but he had confirmed her suspicion. She never changed the coffee, but brought him the same cup both times. What’s interesting about this experiment is that you would have done the same thing.

These are similar experiments to what she does in the lab. She hooks up 128 electrodes to people’s head and measures the brain activity. She then measures their brain’s reaction to flavors and the results are impressive. When testing the same flavor several times, the brain reacts the same each time. But the person she’s testing will have a different emotional reaction most of the time.

The same thing is true of happiness. For example, you may be walking in the park and see two lovers in a warm embrace. You might feel sadness or remorse if you recently had a fight with your significant other. You might feel pleasure if you recently had a romantic evening with your spouse. So, what makes us feel like we’re happy isn’t the measurable chemical reaction in our brains. It’s our opinion of the experience.

Today I know that life is going to bring me some low points to make room for more high points. There are a few ways I can manage this. One way is to take the happy moments as they come, and have a neutral stance on the negative moments. Instead of judging them as bad, I can accept them as what they are and move on. I prefer to consider the negative moments as birth pains required to give light to happier times. There’s a verse in the Bible that describes this well.

Whenever a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy that a child has been born into the world.John 16:21

So why be happy? Any time you’re in a good moment, you know that a bad moment is going to come. What’s the point of enjoying the good moment? This is a matter of getting the sequence wrong. Bad moments don’t FOLLOW good moments, they CREATE them.

When I was a soccer player, the rain was a bad thing. I never liked playing in the rain. Yet if it never rained, then I wouldn’t have had the soft green grass to play on. The rain wasn’t bad. In fact, it allowed for good to happen. In fact, my whole narrative of the soccer experience was backwards. I saw getting picked for a national team (good) followed by working on a ranch (bad).

When you’re in a “bad” moment, don’t judge it or try to block it out. It’s your friend and it’s here to help you. Without it, you cannot have the happy moment which is to come. Instead, be present in the moment. Notice how difficult it is. It’s even a good idea to write about it. Take the moment in, and be grateful that this came to you. James 1 in the Christian Bible says to rejoice when you’re going through difficult times, because trials produce perseverance, which causes you to be mature and complete.

In reality, I struggled through uncomfortable circumstances. They, in turn, BIRTHED the opportunity for the national team. I shoveled manure and struggled to lift hay bales. That PRODUCED an insane strength for an eleven-year-old. Not only that, but I got to ride horses around for a living, which is pretty cool.

When you’re in a “good” moment, savor it. Take note of everything about the moment that you’re living. Instead of fearing that a bad moment will follow, give thanks for the one you’re in.

It can be tempting to discount the moment and say that it’s not as good as you’d like, or that it’s not real. Buddhist monk Geshe Kelsang Gyatso says that true happiness is a state of mind, and cannot be found outside the mind. Reality (outside the mind) will not align with your feelings (inside the mind). If it did, then everyone would eat liver and have the same emotional experience.

You cannot go up forever and never come down. You’ll break your brain. Pleasure and pain have to exist in a cycle. Instead of looking backward at the happiness you

used to have

, you can look forward. Your unhappiness is preparing you for what comes next.