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To be happy you need to take risks. Risk strips the blandness out of an everyday existence and affirms the life within you. I needed to do something. This I knew. I had survived eight years of emotional turmoil, family illness and death. My life seemed to be cruising on calmer waters for the time being. But still I felt a certain sorrow. My soul was demanding my attention. I needed to add something to my life. Something that was missing.
In his book, Too Soon Old Too Late Smart (Hodder 2005), psychiatrist Gordon Livingston, wrote ‘Happiness is not simply the absence of despair. It is an affirmative state in which our lives have both meaning and pleasure’. Like many busy mothers and, indeed, fathers I had slipped into a sort of holding pattern in life. I could deal with so many issues: mundane everyday issues; major issues such as a death in the family, teenage rebellion, chronic illness, career worries, hormones, money issues and more. I could cope. And that’s where I remained, on that coping level. I needed to draw joy and excitement into my life. But what? Should I draw up a 100-Things-to-Do-Before-I-Die list and go climb Everest, jump out of planes, go raving….what?
Science can explain the rush of euphoria. It’s a hormone hit. Those who go bungee jumping, skydiving or white water rafting are the adrenaline junkies. A rush is the drug you take when you are not taking drugs. The combination of fear, relief and excitement send a potent hormonal cocktail mix surging through your veins similar to a cocaine high. Euphoria is delivered by a combination of three hormones. Once the sheer terror of launching yourself out of the plane has subsided, the euphoria-hormone-party-pack kicks into play. There is a flood of dopamine, the happy hit, noradrenaline, the energy blast and endorphins, the floating-on-air fix. You become a happy, hopping about energiser battery bunny, whose head is floating on air well after you have landed.
But the hormone hit doesn’t last, a few minutes, maybe a few hours. The first time you jump out of a plane the euphoria might last a day. Maybe. Less the second time around. And it makes no sense to logic. The expense, the effort and the risk hardly seem worth an hour of floating on air sensation and a few drinks at the pub later. And there is the downside of the hormonal rush. After the euphoria everyday life seems a little dreary, dull and depressing for a time. Moreover, in the West many structure their lives to mimic manic-depression. The extreme high on the weekend is followed by down and miserable days of drudgery at work. Or the extreme pace, time pressures and demands of work are followed by flat and depressing weekends where the afflicted can barely get off the couch. In our culture madness is lived as the lifestyle of choice.
But why are so many in our culture willing, often, to risk their lives for that ever so brief hormonal hit called a rush? The irony is that we in the West go to such trouble making rules and regulations to make the world safe. Yet every weekend the young and hormone rich, the workplace drones, the bored, the restless, the drearily domesticated and others go out on weekends and risk their lives. They throw themselves out of planes to form human snowflakes in the sky even though every other week some orange-suited package of human slush is sacrificed to the god of Gravity. They climb perilous mountains, race each other – officially and unofficially – on motorbikes and motor cars, descend into dank subterranean caves, dive into black and treacherous sink holes and jump off skyscrapers and bridges. They choose reality as a cartoon of distortions delivered by needle, pill or powder. They pay for the present with a slice of tomorrow. When ecstasy ebbs leaving its tide mark of despair. Why? The answer is simple. Euphoria has a place in the spectrum of human emotions.
Your brain is built layer upon layer like an onion. At the base of your brain is the reptile brain. The mammal brain sits on top of it and the human brain, left and right, wraps over the top of the mammal brain. The mammal brain is your survival brain. All emotions are generated here. Euphoria appeals to this mammal brain of yours that doesn’t have to think or be responsible. We hear the call of the forest still:
Come out of your cave/ Come out, Come out/ Come smell the sweet air of the night forest/ Come taste the ripened, psychedelic fruit/ Come test your guile and cunning against the ember-eyed predators of the forest as they slip like stealth through the whispering trees/ Come ignite the life in your veins / Come mortal, come beast ………look death in the eye. We need risk in our lives to confirm the life within us. But remember, when you look death in the eye, my friend, death is also looking at you. Risk has a price.
But euphoria need not be so extreme. You can reduce the high and avoid the crash landing by simply doing something different in your life. Be a clown. Take up tap dancing. Join a choir. Moving out of your comfort zone can shake you out of a weary, drone-like existence. I chose travel. Despite the illness in the family, we packed our bags and headed for Italy and, in the words of Charles Dickens, ‘It recalled us to life’. We had, each of us, been burdened by the weight of our mutual miseries and dulled by the drudgery of long, ordinary days. But now the red poppies bloomed in the field below our old stone Villa, the local church bells rang out across the valley and as the sun shone upon us we found music and laughter alive in our hearts. I had discovered an important but often overlooked insight of the Lost Art of Happiness:
If your life is too dull stand closer to the flame.
Edited extract from Forgotten Wisdom. A search for the Lost Art of Happiness. by Kerry Cue (Brolga. 2008). $24.95 www.kerrycue.net
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