Find Triple-A Happiness In Your Enduring Traits Rather Than In Your Temporary States
Enduring traits oppose temporary states.
Photo by Don Pierce
Generally, when one calls upon a set of personal strengths, one’s day goes better than when one merely exposes oneself to mindless pleasure. Wellbeing comes from engaging one’s enduring strengths and virtues. Focus on bolstering positive traits rather than on building up a storehouse of positive states. The enduring traits are abiding dispositions that lead to virtue. They offer a better payback than the temporary states that come from transitory pleasure. The trait of optimism, for example, helps a person feel that negative occurrences are temporary, controllable, and limited in affect. No transient state can have such a widespread and lasting positive effect.
Of the two ways to build happiness—1) securing better shelter, finer clothes, and more prestigious friends and 2) mental development—the latter is definitely more abiding. No gains in the Realm of Externality will be sufficient to secure happiness without a corresponding development of peace of mind.
When I was a child, from the Third Grade through High School, whenever I needed more peace of mind (at least three times a week in the Fourth and Fifth Grades), for some reason unknown to me then, I found emotional comfort by perching myself high up in trees, usually in tree houses of my own design and construction, some minimal, some elaborate. It simply added to my peace of mind to be up in the air with the leaves, the higher perspectives, the birds, and the freedom from people with low empathy. Notice that I did not climb telephone polls or buildings. I preferred the solitariness of the branches of thorny locust trees, sycamore trees, and box elders. Investigations in Japan have shown that climbing natural trees reduces tension, lowers anxiety, improves mental clarity, and encourages one to engage in conservation activities (Selhub, 2012, p. 120). I can attest to the fact that my tree climbing had all of these effects on me. Tree climbing gave me a chance to process my own pre-teen thoughts, which often drifted towards conservation. Next, you will find a related activity.
To The Eighth Of Many Touchstones Of People-Nature Interfacing…
HumaNatureConnect Activity
If this is not a day when you prefer to spend time in nature without an agenda, do the following activity:
Start-up Protocol
Read The Text — Use your literary sense, your mind sense, and your reason sense to read your way towards happiness and sustainability but do not just be an arm-chair traveler. Use your other natural senses as you also spend healthful, fun, and productive time in nature on your way to Gladandgreen Junction.
Attractive Natural Being — With pen and journal in hand, go to a natural area and look around to find a natural being that is attractive to you.
Appreciation and Gratefulness — While admiring your chosen being, appreciate it with your inhalations and give it gratitude with your exhalations.
Consent — Once you find an aspect of nature that is attractive to you continuously for at least ten seconds, think of your continued attraction as your consent to have a connection experience that will lead to your optimal functioning.
The Natural Senses — After gaining consent to enter into a connection experience with the natural being, have available the list of Natural Senses. Mix it up by using at least one radiation sense, one feeling sense, one chemical sense, and one mental sense, to widen your perception, and add variety to your experience.
HumaNatureConnect Activity — After reading the text, finding a natural being, appreciating it, gaining its consent, and scanning the list of natural senses, use your heightened awareness and nature-induced optimal functioning to do the following activity and engage in as many follow-up components as you see fit.
Generating Patterns Of Human-Nature Interaction # 8:
Climbing
For this activity, make a climb after you feel connected to your chosen attractive natural being. In doing this interaction pattern, you could be playing a video game of climbing (a perverse interaction pattern) or you could be climbing a rock wall in a gym (a domestic interaction pattern). By choosing instead to climb a tree, natural mountain, or cliff (a wild interaction) you would be doing something that will have a positive psychological affect on you.
In your journal, write down what meaning you would derive from this wild interaction pattern; what joy, if any, it would produce; how, if at all, it would build within you a bond between your mind and nature; and how, if at all, the wild version of this interaction pattern would be better for you than the perverse or domestic instantiation of the same interaction pattern; and how not being allowed to participate in this sort of wild interaction pattern ––climbing a tree or a natural cliff––would make you feel? How does interacting in this way in the presence of your attractive natural being make you feel? How would it feel to have this interaction without the presence of your attractive natural being? In writing down these responses you will be adding to our collective nature language, so important to rekindling the bond between humans and nature.
Follow-up Protocol
Natural Systems Reflection Process
For best results, write down your impressions of this activity in your journal using as many of the following components as you see fit, afterwards, share your interpretations with others.
Journal Components
General Description — writing a general description of how you did the activity and what happened.
Freeform — writing, in freeform, what you found attractive about your natural being.
Three Qualities — writing down three qualities you found most attractive about your natural being.
Three Learnings — writing down three things you learned from this activity.
Self-esteem & Trust — writing down how, if at all, this activity changed your self-esteem or trustfulness of Nature.
Changes To Self — writing down what aspects of your self, if any, were changed by this activity.
Honor Yourself — praising yourself and your commitment to making another stop along the Heartwood Path good for yourself and the world.
I’m A Person Who . . . — writing down three different so-called “G/G Statements” using the following format: “This connection experience tells me that I am a person who__________.”
Feelings If Activity Taken — writing down a sentence about how you would feel if you lost your ability to experience this connection.
Nature Compared To Self — creating a sentence that reads: “I love this (insert words that identify the attractive natural being) because it is (insert words that refer to the qualities you like about the natural being).” Then, creating a parallel sentence that reads: “I love (insert the word “myself”) because I am (insert the same qualities as before).” If only one follow-up component can be done at any one waypoint, do this one. It reveals a lot about the participant quickly. In group settings it is a very good way to get pertinent conversation underway.
Ride The Green Wave — determining whether you understand and agree with all of the Ten Green Wave Validation Statements. In your journal, give yourself a plus sign (+) if you do agree and a minus sign (-) if you do not agree. Do not worry if you do not give yourself a plus sign (+). These notations are merely for your own information. Regardless of your own plus or minus assessments, you are always free to move on; or, if you are attracted to do so, you can always revisit the waypoint, ask for Guidance, and/or redo the activity.
Two-Word Summary — writing down two words that summarize your response to this activity.