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Reflections on a coaching life
Hello, and welcome back to my journey as a Pilgrim coach. On a scale of one to 10, how happy were you yesterday? If you ask most parents what they want for their children at whatever stage of life their children happen to be, it's likely that they will conclude by saying, well, whatever they end up doing, I just want them to be happy.
Happiness is big business these days. The question with which I introduced the show came from a piece of social research on happiness. You can take your own personal happiness audit. Read many books on happiness, what it is, how to find it, the psychology behind it, explore the history and the future of happiness. You can even spend some time in your own happiness lab running personal experiments to discover what psychologists, doctors, and faith leaders have to say about happiness. Link to that in the show notes.
There are practical steps you can take which will increase the likelihood of you experiencing emotional well-being. In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies five areas of life in which we can make investments in habits that will promote happiness. These include knowing yourself, strengthening your mind, your body, and your relationships, making work lovable, and finding a cause or vision of life beyond your own. Some people have even tried to come up with a formula for happiness. I'll mention one later. Invest in the right circumstances, says Jonathan, and happiness will emerge.
The question of happiness is part of our consideration of the second facet of the thriving life. What does a thriving life feel like? Well, we could just say that the thriving life feels happy, but since happy can mean any of - and not limited to - high spirited, jovial, delighted, exultant, high, or in love, I'd like to suggest some alternatives.
What we think the thriving life feels like isn't just a matter of describing an emotional state. It reflects something deeper, how we understand the world in which we live and our part in it. How we see the world will motivate how and where we invest in the emotional dimensions of a thriving life.
Of all the many different ways we could explore this subject, I'd like, for the purpose of the next few minutes, to explore four ways in which the thriving life might feel. If someone is experiencing what the thriving life feels like, are they feeling lucky, feeling pleasure, feeling contentment, or feeling joy.
To think about the thriving life as feeling lucky, we need to have a look at a little of the history of the word happy. The Latin word for happy is Felix, which surprise, surprise, also means lucky.
Felix itself is from an even older Greek word meaning fertile. In the ancient world, if your land was fertile, you were lucky, and if you are lucky, you are happy. The idea found its way into old English through the word hap, which also means luck. We see the idea in words we use today like hapless or haphazard.
If happiness is luck, then the emotional component of the thriving life isn't something we find. It finds us. More to the point, it finds us as and when it wants to. Maybe we can take some steps towards making ourselves easier for luck to find, but in the end, we can't control the extent to which we will feel the emotional dimension of the thriving life. If you live your life almost exclusively on autopilot, doing what you do because it's there, or if you think free will is an illusion and what happens in your life is down to forces over which you have little or no control, then this is possibly the best you can hope for. But for most people who have thought about the question, we don't have to settle for the thriving life being nothing more than feeling lucky.
The nineteenth century English philosopher and social reformer, Jeremy Bentham, now widely regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism, reckoned we have a lot of control over how we could thrive emotionally. In terms of the thriving life, the emotional side wasn't just the main thing for Jeremy, it was the only thing. He had a word for this - pleasure - and a formula for acquiring as much of it as we could. To streamline one of Jeremy's quotes, Good is pleasure or exemption from pain, Evil is pain.
The flourishing life can be explained quite simply. It's one of maximal pleasure and a minimal pain. You can assign points to what gives you pleasure. And for those of us from The UK familiar with a certain game show, points mean prizes. Jeremy Bentham will give you points for what gives you pleasure and bonus points for what gives you greater or longer lasting pleasure. Deduct the points you allocate to what gives you pain, and you have your formula for how the thriving life feels.
What constitutes pleasure is determined by whoever experiences it. Whether that's the sudden and unexpected scent of mint in your herb garden, the satisfaction of beating your personal best in your morning run, or the thrill of potting the black to win the game of pool down your local pub, pleasure is however you define it for yourself. There are no higher or lower pleasures. Pleasure is pleasure defined by you.
Popular in life coaching, one idea for keeping the tank of your emotional well-being topped up is to create your own happiness bingo card. For each day of the week, make a note of every time you come across or engage in any of the following. Something you really enjoyed eating, some physical exercise you engaged in, something you did that gave you a sense of achievement, something you looked at that gave you pleasure, and something random that made you smile. See what you accumulate by the end of the week, and if you have something in every column, give yourself a prize. For Jeremy Bentham, luck will play some part in all of this - we can't control all the circumstances of our lives, but we have a big say in what we do with those circumstances as we encounter them. We have sufficient personal agency, the power to choose and to act to maximise our pleasures and minimise our pain.
Tactically, as we have seen through the bingo card, there is value in this idea, but would you want to make it the basis of the whole life? Let's test this out with the aid of a little thought experiment. Let's say we could design a drug that would allow you to feel good over a long period of time. Whatever calamity befalls you, whatever precious relationship you lose, whatever dreams are unfulfilled, the drug is always kicking in to ensure that in spite of all of this, you still feel wonderful. Is that a life you would want or really want? Is it a life worth wanting?
And does this really work as an idea even without our wonder drug? For this formula to work perfectly, we would need to live in a perfect world. A life where we would perfectly feel good would be a life where there is no pain, not just minimised pain. That's not the world we're living in, and for many people in history, and not a few people today, getting a positive balance for pleasure over pain is really, really difficult.
I think we need a bit more than the pursuit of pleasure to discover what the thriving life feels like. For at least one very influential thinker in world history, the pursuit of pleasure isn't even a component of the thriving life. It's a major obstacle to achieving it.
Siddhartha Gautama, better known to us as the Buddha or enlightened one, lived in India somewhere around the fifth and sixth century BC. The Buddha was concerned with the practical questions of what a thriving life was like, exploring concepts of happiness and virtue. He helpfully boiled down his understanding of how to find a thriving life through four concepts, four Noble Truths. The first is that suffering is an inherent part of life and we can't avoid it. The cause of suffering is desire, craving for sensual pleasures and attachments to worldly possessions and power. But as the third noble truth shows, there is a way to end suffering.
You can do this through detaching yourself from craving and attachment. The way to do that is through the fourth Noble Truth, what the Buddha called the Eightfold Path. A combination of the four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path will bring us to enlightenment and the experience of the emotional dimension to the thriving life, which is contentment. If pleasure is hot, burning, and passionate, contentment is cool, calm, and peaceful.
You can see where he and Jeremy Bentham would disagree. For Jeremy, identifying and fulfilling your desire for pleasure is a solution. For the Buddha, it's a problem. And it's not just a problem because the Buddha has a different way of thinking about desire or pleasure. We can only detach ourselves from desire by detaching ourselves from what's doing the desiring, what the Buddha calls the self, what today we might call the ego. Well, if you want to explore all that, you'll need to have a look at the Buddha's eightfold path. Suffice to say for our purposes is that Jeremy Bentham's pleasure and the Buddha's contentment are two very different ways of understanding how the thriving life feels.
Other great thinkers would also ask us to consider contentment as the way the thriving life feels. For the Athenian philosopher Socrates, you will find contentment through being satisfied with your hardest won achievements. It's like filling your storage pots with the good things that he says are, and I quote, "Procured with much toil and trouble." To continue to seek pleasure beyond that is to spend your life expending effort to fill jars which are full of holes.
Someone else who talked about the experience of contentment was the apostle Paul. If you ever wanted an example of a colourful life, you don't have to look too much further than Paul. Whilst heavily invested in persecuting the followers of Jesus - who Paul regarded as a false teacher and troublemaker - Paul had a dramatic conversion experience. As a man who did nothing by halves, once he had concluded that Jesus was the Messiah and Lord he claimed to be, there was no other option for Paul than to go all in and align himself to Jesus' mission. A practical man as well as a deep thinker and strategist, Paul had a number of successful business partnerships, making tents, which at various junctures financed his lifestyle and later his missionary work.
Even when he was doing well financially, friends and supporters would give him additional support. He knew what it was to be well off.
But his life wasn't all comfort and success, far from it. Paul paid a huge price for his faithfulness to Jesus' cause. He was subjected to judicial flogging, which physically marked him for life. He was the target of assassination attempts, experienced betrayal from people he thought he could trust, and was once left for dead after being stoned by a mob. He was shipwrecked three times, spending a day and a night in the open sea, and even on dry land traveled in areas where he was at risk of robbery or mugging.
In the midst of the various experiences of life, Paul, in his own words, discovered a secret - contentment.
We still have access to a number of Paul's letters, which the churches to which he wrote them treasured and copied to ensure they were preserved for posterity. In his letter to the church in the Roman colony of Philippi, he thanks the Christian community there for sending him a gift to ease his stay whilst he was in a Roman prison. Paul is both grateful for their kindness and wants to reassure them that he really is okay with his lot since, as he writes, "I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I find myself. I know how to make do with little, and I know how to make do with a lot. In any and all circumstances, I've learned the secret of being content. Whether well fed or hungry or in abundance or in need, I am able to do all things through him who strengthens me."
For Paul, the discovery of contentment came not with the reordering of his desires, not by constraining them through an orderly and disciplined life, or by detaching himself from them.
For Paul, contentment is the secret that is uncovered by discovering a centre around which to orient his whole life, including his emotional life. It's where, in the same letter, he reflects upon what he used to consider to be important in life. His status as a good Jew, a careful observer of the traditions and practices of his sect, the Pharisees, and his pride in his family history. He writes, “I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. Yes, everything else is worthless compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage so I could gain Christ and be one with him.”
Paul has found something more valuable than reputation, success, safety, comfort, or pleasure - Christ himself.
But Paul has more to say on the subject of how the thriving life feels, and for this I'll conclude by introducing you to a contemporary theologian whose work, like Paul's, emerged from his own powerful and formative experiences of life. He points to the fourth way I would like to think about how the thriving life feels, joy.
On the night of 07/24/1943, the Royal Air Force began a nine day firebombing campaign on the German city of Hamburg. Within the ruins of the city, operation Gomorrah left 42,000 civilians dead and over thirty thousand injured. Part of a team manning a German anti aircraft battery in the centre of Hamburg was a 16 year old youth named Jurgen Moltmann. Jurgen narrowly survived the inferno. On the last day of the raid, a bomb hit the platform where he stood with his friend, Gerhard Schopper. One moment they were together, and the next Schopper was gone.
In his autobiography, Maltmann writes, "During that night, I cried out to God for the first time in my life and put my life in his hands. I was as if dead and ever received life every day as a new gift. My question was not, why does God allow this to happen? But, my God, where are you? And there was the other question, the answer to which I'm still looking for today. Why am I alive and not dead like a friend at my side?"
In a prisoner of war camp in Kilmarnock, which is Scotland for my overseas listeners, Juergen was deeply moved by the love and humanity of the Scottish workers and their families. He also started to read a bible given to him by a prison chaplain. Jurgen writes, "I discovered Psalm 39 and the gospel of Mark with the death cry of Jesus, and I felt that there is one who understands me. And from my own feeling of forsakenness, I understood his forsakenness between Gethsemane and Golgotha. And so I came to a belief in Christ. It's only for Christ's sake that I believe in God, not the other way around. God is not the general director of the theater. He is in the play."
Jurgen Maltmann went on to have a distinguished academic career and became one of the most influential theologians of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Two of his best known works are the Theology of Hope, which appeared on the front page of the New York Times, and The Crucified God. Any view of what the thriving life feels like has to wrestle with the question of what you do with circumstances of life that are overwhelmingly contrary to any kind of life that's desirable. An early Christian writer said that Jesus endured the cross because of the joy set before him. What is this joy discovered even in the face of extreme pain, and how did someone like Jurgen Moltmann find it? In Jurgen's words, “Joy is the power to live, to love, to have creative initiative. Joy awakens all our senses, energising mind and body.” He contrasts joy with fun. Fun is short term, satisfies the desire for amusement, and must be repeated again and again in order for it to last. Joy is only possible with our whole heart, our soul, and all our energies. We can find joy in creation and in people who choose to find the flourishing life by living it out of mutual love.
Sharing the biblical worldview that we live in the overlap between two dimensions of God's creation, the physical world we mainly inhabit, and the spiritual heavenly reality in which we coexist, Jurgen remembers the pervasive notion in the Christian New Testament that joy is always “in the Lord." As Jesus says, there is always joy when people whose lives are morally compromised turn back to God and all their lives around him.
The apostle Paul encouraged his churches to rejoice always, but he also said, “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” Like me, you may well have attended a funeral where there was joy over celebrating a life lived well and deep sadness over the loss of a relationship with a much loved person.
We weep over the loss of a relationship because it's valuable, precious, and even if we didn't know the individual that well, we can still share in the loss of the people who did. To weep with those who weep and to rejoice with those who rejoice is to live a life of solidarity with people experiencing the full range of emotions in life. And this, for Moltmann, brings us to an even deeper secret for the discovery of contentment. He writes, “The secret of life is love. In love, we go out of ourselves and lay ourselves open to all the experiences of life. In the love of life, we become happy and vulnerable at the same time.In love, we can be happy and sad. In love, we can laugh and weep. In love, we can rejoice and must protest at the same time."
So what do you think? How would you expect the thriving life to feel? Is it luck, pleasure, contentment, or joy? And if you expect to find what you're looking for in a combination of the above, which one is the most important? Is one a foundation on which the others are built or a centre around which the others revolve?
Whatever you decide, you're buying into a particular view of the world. With some form of fatalism, we just have to accept whatever luck brings our way. Some form of materialism tells us that human agency will enable us to find what we're looking for since everything we need is built into the world as we experience it. Buddhist impermanence provides the logical basis for detachment and the Christian view of the overlap between the two dimensions of God's created reality, supremely united in the person of Jesus Christ, makes Jesus the source of life and of joy.
One of these or something like them will form the coherent basis for your investments in whatever will allow you to experience the emotional component of the thriving life.
We've started to think about the intersection of the circumstances of the thriving life with how the thriving life feels. Both of these intersect with our third facet, a life which is lived well.
How does living consistently with our values influence our view of what makes for desirable circumstances? How does living life well influence our desires? After all, in Twitter's Schadenfreude, pleasure derived from someone else's misfortune, we find many examples of weeping over those who rejoice and rejoicing over those who weep. Is that kind of pleasure worth wanting? Does it have any place in the thriving life?
And by what criteria, what values criteria, would we evaluate it? Join me next time as we explore five ways in which we might find out. Until then, goodbye and go well.