Happiness Through Humanism: thinking

It turns out the adage that an unexamined life is not worth living is true.

The New York Times had a wonderful article last year on how to live wisely. It is about college students at Harvard who participated in a non-credit seminar called “reflecting on your life” which considered of 3 90 minute discussions with 1st year students facilitated by faculty. See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/how-to-live-wisely.html

Participants were asked thoughtful questions. How well do your commitments reflect your goals? How do you spend your free time? (In other words, what are you passionate about?) Would you rather be extremely good at one thing or pretty good at a lot of things? What are your core values and how does your chosen career path align with them? How do you define success and why?

3 years later, the participants all reflected that the experience of thinking about what it is they value was valuable and helped them turn “college into the transformational experience it is meant to be.”

Want to live life wisely? Thing about what it is you value.

You can't just wish your
problems away

I don’t know about you, but every once in a while, I wish that I could just solve my problems without making any real effort. Just a wave of my wand and whatever was bothering me would go away.

Obviously I know the world doesn’t work like that. In order to solve my problems, I have to actually work at it. The problem is that magical thinking is really tempting. I mean, who hasn’t wished they could just teleport somewhere when they are running late?

The danger of magical thinking though, is at it’s greatest when we are confronted by a problem we cannot solve. And yes, this does happen. Quite frequently actually. This is why the Serenity prayer is so important. Yes, you must have the courage to change the things you can, but you also need the patience to tolerate the things you cannot change and, the wisdom to know the difference.

The reason you don’t want to resort to magical thinking is this. If you aren’t trying to practically solve your problem, you won’t know whether this is a problem that can be solved or not. You can usually only find that out by actively trying to solve your problem. While magical thinking is harmless if you are trying to solve a problem that can’t be solved, it will prevent you from solving the problems you have.

Better to at least attempt to solve a problem and fail than to never try at all.

Image: "The Magician" by luigi diamanti http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/