ERIC WENNINGER

Tag: wisconsin

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.
Contemplating Blue

October 7, 2024

Painting of Grenada and its two smaller islands, Carriacou and Petite Martinique, to the north — a happy discovery while paying a campus parking ticket in the Chancellery building at SGU

Fall is my favorite time of year. As the days get shorter, the nights get cooler, inviting you to put on something cozy and warm before gathering round a campfire with friends. By the time October rolls around, football season is well underway, as are the yellows and reds scattered amongst the once-green leaves of the Northwoods. To me, fall is comfort. I love how it leads into the holiday seasons of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas—joyous times that each conjure their own moods of nostalgia mixed with anticipation.

I’ve always been grateful to live in a place that has four seasons. While living outside of any one season, you gain a fresh perspective of all the wondrous elements that season holds and look forward to the moment it will arrive again. It’s a constant cycle of welcoming back something that’s both novel and completely familiar at the same time.

The following image from kottke.org struck me in its representation of how seasons bring change to one, isolated place, in this case a Finnish island, which is surprisingly shaped similar to Grenada.

Four seasons in the life of a Finnish island (via kottke.org)

Living abroad brings with it a strange juxtaposition of missing where you’re from while embracing where you are. I’ve been missing fall in the Midwest and all its delights, the changing of the color of leaves among them. In Grenada, there’s a rainy season and a dry season. We’re currently in the rainy season, which ends in late November. Other than scattered showers, I’ve started to wonder, “What aspects of Grenada should I be embracing while it’s my time to be here?”

This was on my mind one morning when I picked up Rick Rubin’s, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I’ve been reading it every morning as a kind of devotional. The chapters are short and accessible, and offer a wealth of practical wisdom on cultivating creativity in your life—a perfect way to start the day. In a chapter on nature as teacher, Rubin brings up the seasons and other ways nature changes. He writes:

Nature is the most absolute and enduring. We can witness it change through the seasons. We can see it in the mountains, the oceans, the deserts, and the forest. We can watch the changes of the moon each night, and the relationship between the moon and the stars.

He goes on to talk about the wide range of color available to us in nature:

If you step out in nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade.

Reading this really primed me (no pun intended) to intentionally embrace all of the new colors around me. As is the case with most things in life, when you catch onto an idea, other connections to that idea seem to pop up everywhere you look. Shortly after reading Rubin’s description of nature’s infinite color palette, I stumbled upon the following video from thurstonphoto.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Philip Thurston (@thurstonphoto)

The wave crashing beautifully in slow motion reveals a wide spectrum of blues and greens, a nuance that might go unnoticed in real time or casually missed by the unattuned eye. Anyone who comes to Grenada can see that the ocean surrounding it is made up of a vast array of blues and greens. I started to wonder if I might pull some meaning from them in the same way I would while reflecting on the reds and yellows of my home during this time of year.

Looking out over the Caribbean Sea from the campus of St. George’s University

So this October I’m contemplating blue. In his book, Theory of Colours (via The Marginalian), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe writes:

We love to contemplate blue — not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.

I relate to being drawn into a thing. Strangely, I think we are drawn into gazing out at the immensity of the ocean in a way that’s similar to how we are drawn into staring at the intimacy of a fire’s flame—one large and one small, yet both inspiring a sense of awe. Considering the connection here to the fall (warmth of a fire), I was motivated to dig (or swim?) further.

I discovered Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, via The Marginalian, and am currently working my way through it. In her book, Solnit contemplates the color blue. She starts by providing a scientific basis for why we see different shades of blue in nature and goes on to describe blue as the color of desire and longing. She writes:

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

I found this so applicable to my current feelings of wanting to embrace Grenada while at the same time missing home. Solnit goes on to caution against fulfilling our desires through closing the great distance embodied by the blue of the ocean, in an attempt to grab hold of that which we seek. She writes:

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond […] Something is always far away.

The idea of owning your “longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed,” speaks an overwhelming truth to my soul. There is such empowerment to be found in accepting whatever uncontrolled adversity you face, and embracing those aspects of life that are within your ability to control. A shift of perspective is often all it takes. As humans, we are always longing for something, whether it be within our control or beyond it. What if we made peace with this fact and were contented to live in harmony alongside that longing instead? She concludes:

The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not … abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
[…]
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

It is indeed a complex terrain we traverse, filled with surprising contradictions.

Various shades of ocean blue I’ve found in Grenada

I see shades of blue all around me here. The ocean is reminding me of all the beauty to be found in this place just as it reminds me of how much I long for home.

Yet, if the blue of the ocean represents a great distance between me and home, I think it also provides a connection. Wisconsin is no stranger to expansive bodies of water after all. As I sit on a beach on the southern shores of Grenada, I know that two buddies of mine may very well be sitting on the northern shores of Wisconsin. I’m content to think about them, along with many others, while I welcome new waves upon my shore.

My buddy Joe J’s tattoo, revealing the blue and green shades of Lake Superior

As a final note, I love the music of fall. For the past couple of years I’ve put together a new Halloween mix each October. The Charlie Brown holiday specials are also some of my favorites, and I love the mood that the Vince Guarldi Trio brings to each season. So in honor of where I come from and where I am, I put together an October Oceans playlist. I intentionally made it to blend together the blues and greens of the Caribbean with the reds and yellows of the Midwest. You can listen to it here.