ERIC WENNINGER

Tag: life

Look Away from Happiness

May 9, 2025

Flexbox Centered Text
Doc Hudson – Image via Fandom

Anyone who grew up driving in Wisconsin, or any other part of the world destined for slippery streets in winter, knows that sometimes you have to turn right to go left.

It follows, then, that anyone who grew up driving in Wisconsin wasn’t surprised by what Doc Hudson said to Lightening McQueen in the Pixar movie Cars: “I’ll put it simple. If you’re going hard enough left, you’ll find yourself turning right.”

But Lightening McQueen didn’t grow up in Wisconsin and he doesn’t get it. He’s too focused on turning left that he can’t do it. A prideful McQueen fails to see that to reach his desired goal, he has to change his way of doing things. Ultimately, he has to look outside of himself and adapt to his environment.

Turn right to go left, from Pixar’s movie Cars

Sometimes, to reach our desired goal, we have to take action that is unexpected, even counterintuitive to what our initial game plan might’ve been. Focusing too hard on the goal, it turns out, can actually blind us to the steps we need to take and prevent us from getting to where we want to go.

In the wake of Gene Hackman’s death, I read an article that quoted him as having once said:

I don’t like to look real deep at what I do with my characters. It is that strange fear that if you look at something too closely, it goes away.

Hackman was an outstanding actor who I imagine worked very hard at his craft, so what did he mean? Maybe great actors bring their characters to life by focusing on something other than the end result. His words started me thinking about certain areas of expertise or states of being that can only be achieved indirectly. If you shoot for them directly, you’re bound to miss the mark.

For example, considering knowledge of the soul, Virginia Woolf (via The Marginalian) writes:

One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.

In 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman writes about what happens when we focus on using time well:

There’s another sense in which treating time as something that we own and get to control seems to make life worse. Inevitably, we become obsessed with “using it well,” whereupon we discover an unfortunate truth: the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives.

And, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes about the “meh” feeling that arises after visiting a popular natural attraction:

[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of ‘Well, there it is,’ just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at this, just a feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to.

These examples remind me of how important it is to focus on something other than the destination. My wife recently pointed out that the hardest part of running a half marathon is the last half mile, because you’re so preoccupied with being finished. By contrast, if you’re running a full marathon, mile 13 feels just like the others because you’re still focused on the journey.

This past week, I was “playing” a game of cribbage with my friend Matt. After two hours, we had only progressed through one hand. The journey of conversation, it would seem, was more important than the game’s destination.

Cribs progress after 2 hours – “It’s the journey, not the destination.”

Matt and I were happy to be engaged in good conversation, without any preoccupation of it leading to any grand accomplishment or revelation.

Many people struggle with figuring out how to be happy. It’s another one of those elusive states of being that can really only be achieved indirectly. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes:

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy,’ said J.S. Mill, ‘and you cease to be so.’ It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

He goes on to quote Viktor Frankl, who links success with happiness as two things that cannot be pursued directly:

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book Man’s Search for Meaning: ‘Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.’

According to Csikszentmihalyi, happiness is the byproduct of living an active and cognitively engaged life. By focusing on key elements of the journey, happiness—or better yet, deep enjoyment in life—is a destination that can be reached.

Csikszentmihalyi calls the journey “flow,” or the ability to experience so much enjoyment in doing something that you have the positive feeling of losing yourself in the process. If you’re in flow, you’re fully in the moment, without worry or concern for how you’ll obtain happiness. Happiness becomes an afterthought because you’re literally living a journey of self-induced fulfillment.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Another way of understanding flow is as the space between anxiety and boredom. For any activity, we can either further develop our skills or adjust the challenge level to stay in flow. But the important thing to realize is that we’re in control.

Csikszentmihalyi describes the difficult emotions and mental states we experience in life as psychic entropy, or the disorder of consciousness. Without structure, the mind can be a chaotic place, leading to all sorts of woes and ruminations. It needs a sense of order for us to feel secure and satisfied. Flow is what restores that sense of order.

So instead of focusing on the vague end goal of enjoying life, we might look closer at how to bring more flow activities into it. According to Csikszentmihalyi, these are activities that provide us with a sense of control over how we perform and that we have a chance of actually completing. They have clear goals that require concentration to reach, and provide us with feedback on how we’re doing.

In the end, it’s quite simple: flow activities require us to work. Most things worthwhile in life do. The work is the journey to focus on. In the case of flow, it’s involving yourself in activities that increase the complexity of your mind, thereby reducing psychic entropy, and allowing you to experience growth of the self and a deeper enjoyment of life as a result.

Look away from happiness, and instead toward creating quality experiences in life, making the most of what you already have. You might be surprised at how much happier you start to feel.
Home Is People

November 19, 2024

David Berman – Image via “The Perfect Little Lines of David Berman”

My dear friend Matt Neely introduced me to David Berman in the fall of 2003. Matt and I attended grad school together and one day he lent me his CD of the album Bright Flight, by Berman’s band Silver Jews. Their current Spotify bio describes them as “a beautiful mess of indie rock, country-rock and lo-fi with lyrics both witty and profound.” After a few listens I was hooked. Beyond the scratchy guitar rifts and straightforward, yet often fractured folk-rock melodies, I really connected with Berman’s songwriting and shaky vocals. He was a lyricist who could turn a phrase like no other. His crackly deadpan delivery only added to his effectiveness as a storyteller.

One of my favorite lyrics of Berman’s comes from his song “Time Will Break The World.” I repeat it to myself each year when winter grows long and I grow tired of yet another snowfall:

The snow falls down so beautiful and stupid

Couple this with Phil Connor’s prediction from Groundhog Day and you have perfectly summarized the late-winter, early-spring feels of Wisconsin.

Berman struggled with depression and drug addiction throughout his life. Tragically, he died by suicide in August of 2019, just one month after having released his first new music in a decade, under the new moniker Purple Mountains. A close listen to the self-titled album reveals a version of David Berman who was still very much struggling with his demons.

Purple Mountains (via Pitchfork)

I had been planning on seeing Berman perform live for the first time later that summer. The news of his death shook me, as it did so many others. His impact was widespread, among fans and fellow musicians alike, and an outpouring of love and heartfelt condolence seemed to flow from every corner during the weeks to follow. In an article titled “David Berman Changed the Way So Many of Us See the World,” Mark Richardson writes:

It feels important to note that his lyrics, which seemed to be beamed in from another dimension, were used in service of songs that were generally sturdy and sounded good wherever they were needed.

Still, though, those words. Jazz critic Gary Giddins, writing about the work of Ornette Coleman, once noted ‘the music hits me in unprotected areas of the brain, areas that remain raw and impressionable,’ and Berman’s words functioned like that too. He had a gift for writing that, ironically, and in a very Berman-esque way, is hard to talk about. His use of language is so specific, it’s hard to find some of your own to describe it in a way that doesn’t diminish what you’re trying to convey. ‘The meaning of the world lies outside the world’ is how he put a related idea, in another context, in his song ‘People.’ But the way I’m describing it now makes it sound like something heady and tangled and complicated. It was the opposite. Berman had a knack for representing what was right in front of you in a way that made you see it as if for the first time.

I find myself relating to Richardson’s words, as I try to find the right words, to describe David Berman’s words. You’re better off just accessing his music directly. Even if Berman’s suffering was clearly expressed through his songs, he conveyed it in a tone that was both warm and oftentimes comical. There was a therapeutic lightness toward life’s difficulties that he wove into the fabric of his songs. It was a quality that I think genuinely helped a lot of people.

In another song touching on winter’s theme, “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” he writes the ghost of himself into the very song, allowing for visitors to gather round and warm themselves by the fire he creates:

Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song’s design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines

The song builds a room, presumably within a house, where the songwriter continues to live, and hosts whichever guest might appear with a need for warmth and companionship.

Berman wrote a book of poetry called Actual Air, originally released in 1999, but reissued in 2019, also just weeks before his death. As is the case with his songs, Berman’s witty insights about life, in all its wonder and bleakness, can be found in this brilliant collection of poems.

Actual Air, by David Berman

One of my favorites is “The Homeowner’s Prayer.” It’s a poem that considers the circular and linear nature of time. We move through the stages of life on a path toward our imminent demise, as the seasons continue to circle back around, obscuring the fact that one day they no longer will, at least not for us. And the time they take to come around seems to get ever faster as we get older. This is a sad poem about a man’s untaken opportunities and unlived experiences that are eventually lost to him. They were never really his to begin with because he did not live them. Time, as it were, passed him by.

But this poem reminds me that we ought to think of “home” as the people more so than the place. The title seemed incongruent to me at first, but maybe that is the prayer—let me value people above place. I have moved enough in my life to understand that my true home is the people I get to experience life with. Everything loses its flavor when you take away the people for whom you care about the most. We often confuse this simple truth in a modern society that confuses simple facts. What if, as a “homeowner,” the first thing that came to mind were the people who inhabit my heart, rather than the house I inhabit? Berman’s poem helps me to be mindful of the moments I get to spend with my people and to value the immaterial over the material.

I think David Berman knew that home was more than a place. He saw his own songs as a home, not just for him to live in, but also for any guest who would enter them to listen. Here is the poem in its entirety:

The Homeowner’s Prayer – by David Berman

The moment held two facets in his mind.
The sound of lawns cut late in the evening
and the memory of a push-up regimen he had abandoned.

It was Halloween.

An alumni newsletter lay on the hall table
but he would not/could not read it,
for his hands were the same emotional structures
in 1987 as they had been in 1942.

Nothing had changed. He had retained his tendency
to fall in love with supporting actresses
renowned for their near miss with beauty

and coffee still caused the toy ideas
he used to try out on the morning carpools,
a sweeping reorganization of the company softball leagues,
or how to remove algae from the windows of a houseboat.

He remembered a morning when the carpool
had been discussing how they’d like to die.
The best way to go.

He said, why are you talking about this.
Just because everyone has died so far,
doesn’t mean that we’re going to die.

But he had waited too long to speak.
They were already in the parking garage.
And now two of them had passed away.

It was Halloween.

Another Pennsylvania sunset
backed down the local mountain

spraying the colors of a streetfighter’s face
onto the narrative wallpaper of a boy’s bedroom.

Once he thought all he would ever need
was a house with time and circumstance.

He slowly made his way into the kitchen
and filled a bowl with apples and raisins.

The clock was learning to be 6:34.

The willows bent to within decimals of the lawn.

It was Halloween.

The years go round and round. Halloween just passed and soon it will again. The 52 weeks that make up a year bring us back to this same spot pretty quickly. Add up a life’s worth and you only get 4,000 weeks, on average. How will you spend the time?

“Time,” by David Shrigley (via Austin Kleon)