#but they ARE a fully grown adult. beyond that even. ancient 'were you alive to see the dinosaurs grandpa?' ass motherfucker.

[thejudgingtrash]

(unedited and I’m not a native speaker so please point out if you see something odd!)

One day (1,4k)

A quiet day. The air was warm and dry. The wind chimes sang the melody of the clouds and the invisible currents. The paint of the old house was brittle. It would take days to repaint it, if a professional painter would take the job it would tear through savings. But the money was tight, and Percy knew that he had to put his efforts into elsewhere. The hand he was holding reminded him of that. The green on the wood that was decades old could be blown away to reveal the natural layer underneath it. The old Colonial stood in front of them, proud and almighty, but it was nothing more than a lie that has been fed through generations.

The lawn looked nearly identical to the last time Percy had visited. Wild. Unkept. A fight of nature taken back what was rightfully its. And it was he that had mown it to keep it in somewhat of a shape. The old swing had been removed as it was broken beyond repair. It laid in the basement, waiting for a small child to beg for its usage once again.

Attempts to make her move into something smaller and easier have failed. In some cases, it triggered her, and she began to scream and cry. The hands that were thrown weren’t of violence. They were of despair and the deepest pain. That was the sign when Percy knew he had overstepped his welcome. But the misunderstood clouds of sorrow and deep hatred passed and revealed her other side. The motherly side. The sunny side that loved to live and love.

Percy Jackson had returned. It was his semiannual visit to Westport, Connecticut. The youth had vanished from his face, although not entirely. It was a weird state where old and young stood in front of each other. The youth wanted to remain, but the adulthood came to claim its place. A not so young man who had both legs fully integrated in life rang the bell that gave a soft jingle and knocked on the turquoise door.

It swung open after a while. “Oh, hello Percy!” May smiled. She recognized him. Relief. There were times when she did not. “Is it time again?”

“Hello May,” Percy greeted her and entered. Little steps followed him.

The house had been decluttered. May had a knack for keeping everything she deemed interesting and never threw it out. Percy would come with the big blue bags and make her decide what items were necessary and which she wanted to keep. It upset her. But she understood it. At least Percy hoped she did.

“I have made cookies. I might have burnt them a little bit. Oopsie.” Her gaze shifted to the right into another twinkling pair of eyes.

May got on one knee. Her morning dress was clean this time and not burned and pungent like the many times before. “Luke!” she cried with big eyes. “You’re back!”

Her hands grabbed the soft cheeks. “But you are so small,” she whispered. It broke Percy’s heart. “Weren’t you taller?” May Castellan tilted her head and the silver hair fell down her shoulder. She had aged. It had been more than a decade ago, closer to two.

“It’s me, grandma May. It’s me, Theo,” the young boy said.

“My son, May. Do you remember?” Percy asked her.

A wondrous expression rested on her face. “You have become a big brother,” she remembered slowly. “A little girl!”

Theo began to grin and proudly showed his two missing front teeth. “Yes, I’m a big brother now! Ari is so pretty!”

“When will I see your little sister?” May asked and clapped her hands in excitement.

The fact that Annabeth was against a visit with young Ariadne as a safety measurement was something that Percy just couldn’t voice. He knew his wife was right. And still his consciousness made him do these visits. The aged demigod couldn’t save her son, but he refused to fail May Castellan. So, he visited her. Only for certain amounts of times, of course. He never blamed Annabeth and Thalia for staying away. He never blamed Nico for bringing him to this place for the first time. It was destined and running away from the Moirai was never the best option. That was something that had been etched into his mind since he had been a young boy of twelve years in his first year at Camp Half-Blood.

“You will see her soon once she’s grown a little bit more,” he deflected.

“I bet she is a pretty baby. Just like Luke was.”

“Yes. Yes, she is,” Percy said. Was the air getting stuffier? Or why did he feel the tears coming? His chest was heavy and filled with regrets. He blinked the pesky wetness away.

Fatherhood made him come to realize more. It made him understand more. Patience. Love. Forgiveness. It made him understand the complete and utter injustice that was the broken shell of May Castellan. The living contradiction. More dead than alive, a broken record. A mother that was yearning for her son. A mother that was screaming for her son. A son that would never return home again. A mother that couldn’t see that her son would never return home again. Yet the broken fragments of her mind would never let her rest. It would never make it easy for her until she would have her last breath. And what lied beyond that was something that Percy could not imagine.

The wicked ways of the ancient forces. The same gods that had blessed her, had thrown her into despair. They had turned their backs. Even her former lover. A tunnel of sadness where only in certain times and particular angles an illusion of light shone through. That was May Castellan.

The three moved into the kitchen where Percy let his son only eat two cookies and for once little Theo listened to his father. May Castellan didn’t lie, she really had burnt the cookies. But the younger Jackson was too polite to not eat some and thanked May as she wanted to give him more.

“Shall we clean the yard, May?” Percy proposed like he always did.

“Oh yes!” agreed May with glowing eyes like she always did.

He would mow the lawn and trim the bushes and May would take care after the roses. She loved the roses. The roses, the tulips and the sweet lavender that the bumblebees loved to dance around. All reminders of a better and safer time. Times that had passed as flowers would wither in mere moments. Especially those that were unkempt.

Theo played with Rhodius, the son of Blackjack, another young and wild pegasus that let the young boy sit on his back. The Jacksons had used him as a means of transportation. Percy eyed them closely as he did a little bit of yard work. Rest assured; the Pegasus was an excellent babysitter.

After an hour and a half of work, the adults sat down on the porch. Percy brushed the sweat off his forehead. May rushed into the house and brought out glasses of orange juice. Percy tried to not pull a face as he came to realization that she had confused the salt and sugar containers once again. “Luke, my boy,” May said. A dreamy expression rested on her face as she watched young Theo play and chase after the trained legs of the magical creature.

“Percy, when will Luke come back? When will I see my boy?” May asked and turned around to him. Her eyes. They were glazed. The cerulean eyes were so full of life yet mirrored death. Were it the tears or were it the wretched prophecy and the following illusions of the future that haunted her ever since? He would never know. How could he ever know?

“When will my Luke come back?” she cried.

Stomping through the grass. Theo stood in front of his father and saw the heartbroken Mrs. Castellan.

Theo looked up to his father. Even the small boy knew that May Castellan was sick. Slowly dying of a broken heart that could never be mended. Slowly dying of the visions that haunted her and had driven her into her unsafe state.

Percy had subconsciously pressed Theo’s hand as the child sat down on his father’s lap. Percy looked apologizing into the sea green eyes that mirrored his. Only the gray ring and the gray dots that looked like they have been splashed with a paint brush reminded Percy of his mother. His wife. His dear Annabeth.

His heart was heavy and the frown on his face aged the demigod even more. The white in his hair had come back. The streaks had been thicker even.

“One day, May. One day,” he said. One day, he promised.

[the-overgrowth]

Please don't read this ask as combative, I'm just genuinely curious. How do you justify the age difference between Sidra and Val? I know you said Val is technically a teenager/young adult in fae years but isn't that the same justification a lot of immortal/mortal pairings use? (Like Twilight with Edward being "frozen" at 17.) The fact is that Val's lived literally 200+ years more than her and that has to color the experience divide, right? Is there a way authors CAN make these age gaps work?

No worries! I think it’s a good question and gives me an opportunity to clarify some stuff! I should preface this by saying that it’s totally ok if people aren’t comfy with the “young woman paired with ancient magical dude” trope that’s common in fantasy nowadays. It’s not for everyone and that’s fine. I’ve tried to make my take on it more morally palatable, but if it doesn’t work you, then it doesn’t work for you.

Putting this under a cut because it got long, oops.

Val isn’t “frozen,” he literally ages 10 times slower than Sidra, including mentally and emotionally. 50-year-old fae are the equivalent of 5-year-old children. Val being 223 is basically him being in his early twenties, barely mature enough by fae standards to be considered an adult. So while Val has been an adult longer than Sidra has been alive, from her perspective, Val has also been an official “adult” for like, 2-3 years, from his perspective. He also doesn’t see Sidra as being 2 years old, he sees her as being similar to himself in age, as a young adult. In fact, it fucks him up a little that she’s a fully grown person when she’s the same technical “age” as a toddler. The same way it fucks Sidra up that he’s still alive. He can’t wrap his head around how “quick” humans are. To him, growing a mind and a body and a personality takes centuries and she did it in two decades? Weird. Gross.

I should also mention that while yes, technically the sheer amount of stuff he’s seen is more than what Sidra has, the fae also perceive time differently than humans as a result of their immortality. So he doesn’t necessarily retain all of the stuff he’s lived through, or it doesn’t affect him the same way it might affect a young developing human.

However, this is all details compared to what I think is the most important thing in cases like these: framing.

In the case of Twilight, the framing emphasizes how Edward is mature and has been through high school and college multiple times, how he knows and understands more than Bella. His age is written as adding to his power, his allure. He doesn’t consider himself a teenager, and neither do his vampire peers. In every way but physical, he’s an ancient adult. It’s supposed to be intriguing that an older, intelligent and beautiful man would find a plain teenager attractive, and his age is used to reinforce his power and dominance.

If Edward perpetually had the mind of an actual 17-year-old instead of being “physically” 17 and mentally 109 or however old he is, I think Twilight would have the opposite problem of Bella eventually dating a teenager as she grows older unless she turns into a vampire. That’s sort of touched on in the books but it doesn’t go much further beyond “I will be a wrinkly old woman and you’ll be hot forever!” because, again, Edward already had Bella beat in the “life experience” department, and would still have that over her even as she grew older.

In the case of ACOTAR, it’s a similar thing. I don’t recall if it’s ever explained how the fae mature, but I do know that Rhys has been “waiting” for Feyre before she was even born? Like, the mating bond paired him up with a human infant at some point? And he has to wait for her to become an adult before they can boink? Same with Jacob and Renesmee. That’s just straight up magical grooming, fam. These men are adults for an extremely long time while they wait for their younger partner to catch up and become legal, often not even letting her live a life independently before they marry and have babies. These men become their partners’ lives.

In my case, Val’s age is framed against a backdrop of much older fae who patronize, belittle and insult him because he’s a young man poking his fingers into things that he’s too naïve to understand, according to them. This on its own doesn’t automatically solve the age difference, but he’s not framed as having power over Sidra, he’s not considered one of the oldest and most powerful fae, he’s not held up by the narrative as an older man who somehow, against his better judgment, is lusting over someone much younger than him because she’s just so mature and full of life and special. His age isn’t held up as a mark of experience and maturity and power. It’s just a thing that marks him as different from Sidra, on a magical worldbuilding level.

The younger party is also important. Are they inexperienced and naïve? Are they a young sheltered teenager, only now entering their first ever romantic/sexual relationship? Are they entering this relationship without any prior knowledge of who they are and what they want from life and a relationship with this person? Is this adult their first and only entry point to adult life in general? (Not saying you need to have multiple partners before you can find “The One” or anything, but having a frame of reference and knowing what you want out of life and the relationship is important IMO.)

Sidra doesn’t see Val as superior to her, she doesn’t think he’s above her and that she doesn’t “deserve him” or that he’s too good and cool for her, that she’s somehow not enough because she’s younger. She sees him as an equal, which makes any attempt at pulling the age/experience card pretty meaningless, because she doesn’t believe he knows what’s best in any given situation just because of his age. She doesn’t see him as an authority on most things and doesn’t consider herself below him in most things, either. She has already built a solid understanding of who she is and what she wants (or doesn’t want, at least). One of the first things that happens in the book is her rejecting a man because she realizes that she doesn’t want for herself what he wants for her.

And while yes, Val does eventually become a large part of her life and helps her figure out what she wants and needs and what she wants to become, she does the same thing for him. He isn’t a jaded old man taken with a pretty young thing who brings light back into his life or some other cishet-white-man nonsense, he’s young and stupid too and she helps him realize what he wants and who he wants to be. And they don’t do this on purpose to each other, it just happens through their interactions. Even if it were one-sided Val simply doesn’t have the maturity and experience to essentially “groom” Sidra into anything. Plus, they don’t get married and have children at the end (spoilers, I guess). They’re not bound to each other the same way many YA fantasy books often “bind” their young protags to their much older love interests (mating bonds, marriage, kids etc). Sidra still has the choice and ability to leave him whenever she likes and she’s fully aware of it.

That being said, my solution isn’t perfect and tbh I don’t think there is one? But this is fantasy, mortal-immortal pairings will always have weird dynamics because they’re not real and everyone makes up their own reference for how they should or shouldn’t work. Things like these will be subjective, and as long as the characters involved are adults, are making informed decisions and don’t have significant power imbalances because of their age difference, I think it can work! 

(The target demographic is also very important I think. Impressionable teens shouldn’t read things that make adult men attractive or desirable. My target demographic is a bit older than that and I hope most of my future readers will have enough sense and independent thinking to know not to imitate fiction. Plus, again, I’m not playing on or emphasizing the typical age gap power dynamic.)

Hope this answered your question!

[shanedakotamuir]

American happiness is plummeting. Could a few words change that?

A psychologist claims that learning “untranslatable words” from other cultures may be a key to being happy. I experimented on myself to see whether it’s true.

“Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

Screw that.

The saying, sometimes attributed to the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, cautions us to not pursue happiness aggressively; we’ve got to just let it come to us. But for many of us today, such 19th century romantic musings seem quaint, if not downright un-American.

The pursuit of happiness inscribed into the Declaration of Independence has grown into a national obsession. We compulsively compare ourselves to others, asking whether they’re happier than we are and why, and then we buy — a yoga studio membership, an empowerment seminar, an $80 Goop water bottle with a built-in rose quartz crystal — to stop losing the competition.

I admit that I, too, zealously hunt down happiness these days. I’ve had a rough couple of years. My dad had a heart attack. My apartment was burglarized. My knees were gripped by chronic pain so intense that, for a while, I could barely walk.

So when I stumbled across the work of Tim Lomas, I pounced on his books, butterfly net in hand. A lecturer at the University of East London, Lomas specializes in a field known as positive psychology, the study of what makes human beings happy. Not just happy in the narrow sense, like the fleeting joy you get from ice cream, but in the broader sense of human flourishing — what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia. Positive psychologists research which factors are the biggest contributors to well-being, from income level to relationships to religiosity.

Lomas has recently published a trio of works on the connection between well-being and language: The Happiness Dictionary, Translating Happiness, and Happiness Found in Translation, his illustrated chapbook published this fall. In them, he says most of us in the West aren’t as happy as we could be, in part because we have a limited definition of happiness. Other cultures have concepts of well-being that are vastly different from ours, but because they’re expressed in languages we don’t understand, Lomas argues, we’re missing out on the insights they embody.

So in 2015, Lomas started the Positive Lexicography Project, a crowdsourced treasury of global terms of well-being, everything from fjaka (Croatian for “the sweetness of doing nothing”) to ubuntu (Zulu for “a spirit of universal kindness and common humanity: I am because you are”).

With the help of far-flung strangers on the internet, he’s since mined 140 languages to come up with a whopping 1,200 words. Each has its own unique shades of meaning not fully captured in English translation. He argues that engaging with these “untranslatable” terms can help us imagine, and ultimately experience, more types of well-being.

And a sense of well-being seems to be in short supply in the US. Americans are only becoming more miserable, according to the World Happiness Report. In 2019, the US dropped in the rankings for the third year in a row, coming in 19th place. Experts blame the decline on various factors, including the deadliest drug overdose crisis in our history, ever-higher levels of anxiety in annual surveys, and decreased trust in politicians and other public figures.

Against this backdrop, it’s easy to understand why the emerging field of positive psychology has grown popular both in academia and among the public. And given that the American hunt for happiness is turning out to be pretty unsuccessful, it’s not surprising that proposals such as Lomas’s — which suggest turning to other cultures for insight — exert a seductive pull.

When I called Lomas at his home in London, he told me one of his favorite words is wabi sabi, which is Japanese for “imperfect, weathered, rustic beauty.” The term puts him in a different frame of mind, letting him see things with new eyes.

“Right now I’m looking out at my garden,” he said. “There’s some broken pots there. So I’m thinking, is there a way to look at these pots in such a way that, even though they’re imperfect and old, I see there really is a beauty to them?”

Words like these are tantalizing because they’re so much more than just single words — they’re lexical powerhouses that seem to contain entire worldviews. They let us see how other cultures parse their experiences, offering us more options for how we might understand and live ours.

“In positive psychology, interventions might involve recalling a positive experience and writing about it for 20 minutes, or just sitting and meditating on it,” Lomas said. “With wabi sabi, you could send people away for 24 hours and say, ‘Try and notice this wherever possible and keep a diary on those experiences.’”

Psychologists have adopted a term for the ability to distinguish between feelings in an extra-nuanced way: They call it “emotional granularity.” For example, English has words like pleasure, satisfaction, and pride, but they don’t allow you to differentiate between the pride you feel for a friend whose accomplishment you’re also a tad jealous of, and the pride you feel for a friend whom you’re genuinely, 100 percent happy for. Yet Hebrew has a word for the latter — firgun — which describes total ungrudging and overt pride in another’s success. And German has a word for the opposite of firgun: schadenfreude.

Several studies suggest that increasing emotional granularity is good for our mental and physical health. It makes us more aware of our subjective experiences, which in turn makes it easier for us to regulate our emotions and maintain equanimity. It’s a souped-up version of what we do with preschoolers: We teach them to identify their feelings — “I’m mad” or “I’m sad” — which is the first step toward learning how to manage them.

Lomas says we should try doing the same thing as adults but with untranslatable words, so that we add ever more complexity to our emotional vocabularies. Writing in Translating Happiness, he says he’d want to see “a pilot study, followed by larger-scale empirical testing, randomized controlled trials, replication studies, and meta-analyses. These studies could use psychometric scales to assess the extent of improvement.”

Although I’m in no position to conduct a scientific study, I felt a certain frisson (that’s French for “a spine-tingling shiver of excitement”) when I read this. I wondered what would happen if I picked a few untranslatable words and tried to cultivate the types of well-being they embody.

I knew I had no hope of feeling my way into these words the same way they’d be experienced by someone who’s spent a lifetime steeped in the cultural tradition that gave rise to them. For me to try to access these words outside of their original context would inevitably be to impoverish and distort them. Still, I wondered if spending a little time trying to learn from them would make it possible to experience the world just a bit differently.

I began to plan my experiments.

As a teenager, I used to dance salsa and flamenco. But recently? Not so much. Over the past few years, a chronic pain in my knees that no doctor could explain or treat kept me from dancing. Which is to say, it kept me from the activity that helped get me out of my head and into my body, that replaced worry with sensation. Happily, this year the pain finally subsided, and so I figured it was time to give duende a shot.

Duende is Spanish for a heightened state of passionate emotion that you experience through art, especially dance. The poet Federico García Lorca said having duende is “not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins … it burns the blood like powdered glass, it exhausts, it rejects all the sweet geometry we understand.” And according to Lomas, “The term derives from a magical elf-like creature in Spanish mythology, which suggests the nonrational and otherworldly nature of the mental state duende signifies.”

One weekend, I saw online that a club near my house was hosting a Cuban dance party. The party didn’t start until 11 pm and my elder-millennial friends could not be corralled off their couches at such an ungodly hour. So I went alone, figuring I’d do fine.

Nope. Not fine at all. Everyone there was intimidatingly fantastic at salsa dancing! The men’s footwork was so fast that their shoes blurred into invisibility; the women were all hips, dresses describing sexy circles in the air as they spun. I stood with my back pasted to the wall and guzzled rum.

Eventually, I forced myself to find a partner and hit the dance floor. As he cut confidently through the air, I felt like a penguin in his arms, flightless and waddling pathetically. My confidence level did not rise over the next few hours. Each dancer was somehow better than the last, and I was way too self-conscious to feel the passionate, out-of-your-mind ecstasy of duende. It’s hard to feel mystically transported when you’re worried about stepping on some hot guy’s toes.

And although I hated to admit it, the quote attributed to Hawthorne did seem to be on-point: Trying to manufacture joy can make it even harder to access.

It was 2 am when, pasted to the wall again, guzzling water this time, I finally met someone as clueless as I was. I asked him how it was that everyone there was an amazing dancer. “Didn’t you know?” he asked. “These are professionals. Half of them own their own studios in the area.” I exploded into laughter. How did I pick the one club in town where everyone was a goddamn dance instructor?

Knowing that helped me loosen up. The guy and I danced together, laughing at ourselves. I started to actually have fun. We spun each other around. We tangoed across the floor. We jumped onto the sides of pillars and kicked off from them, flying, however briefly, through the air. It was not really duende, but it was a joy I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

The underlying premise of Lomas’s work is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — a theory, proposed by linguist Edward Sapir in 1929 and later developed by his student Benjamin Whorf — that our language shapes what we’re capable of thinking and feeling. The strong version of the hypothesis, linguistic determinism, holds that you can’t experience a feeling the same way if you don’t have a word for it. Linguists critiqued that view heavily in the 1960s and ’70s, and it remains unpopular these days.

But a milder one, linguistic relativity, is still embraced by some scholars, including Lomas. It holds that language influences experience but doesn’t determine it.

Even linguistic relativity is controversial, though. Some linguists, like John McWhorter, insist that “the world looks the same in any language” — and argue that claiming otherwise risks fetishizing some cultures (“Italians are a romantic people”) and demeaning others. I share some of that concern. As a woman of color whose family hails from India, Iraq, and Morocco, I’m always wary of ideas with the potential to Orientalize or exoticize. At the same time, I wanted to engage with Lomas’s ideas in good faith.

Words like these are lexical powerhouses

If you find it hard to believe that engaging with untranslatable words can actually increase your well-being, Lomas told me, consider sati. That’s a Pali word from India that you may have seen translated as mindfulness, though many meditators prefer to leave it untranslated, saying the English term is too cerebral to capture the emotional and ethical valences of the original. (Sati also has a very different unrelated meaning among some Indians and Nepalese.)

In the West, sati has been popularized by people like Jon Kabat-Zinn, a scientist who founded the Center for Mindfulness and who in the 1970s developed an eight-week course for people in clinical settings, which he called mindfulness-based stress reduction. Other American teachers, such as Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, have brought mindfulness practice sessions to the masses. Countless mindfulness apps have also embedded the concept firmly in our cultural lexicon. Lomas points to the rise of sati as evidence that Westerners can study an untranslatable phenomenon, create exercises for cultivating it, and through that measurably improve people’s well-being.

“People looked into sati and built a set of practices around it. That’s been so valuable,” Lomas told me. “Surely there are various other words you could explore in a similar way.”

But by and large, people haven’t yet done that. He’s currently collaborating with scholars in Spain and Japan to see if they can come up with exercises that will help people develop an experiential understanding of untranslatable terms.

Yet just as you need many, many hours of practice to develop mindfulness as a permanently altered trait rather than a temporarily altered state, cultivating different types of well-being will require more than a single exercise to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

It will also require that Westerners expand our notion of happiness. Some types of well-being, Lomas writes, don’t come in purely pleasurable packets — they’re ambivalent, containing both positive and negative valences. Think of the Italian word magari, which suggests a sense of “maybe, possibly,” the wistful hope of “if only.” Or the Amharic word tizita, which means “a bittersweet remembrance and longing for a time, person, or thing gone by.” Lomas writes:

Psychologists are increasingly appreciative of such feelings, as seen in an emergent body of work that my colleagues and I refer to as “second-wave” positive psychology. When positive psychology was initiated in the 1990s, it defined itself by focusing on positive emotions and qualities. Before long, however, scholars started to critique this foundational [Western] concept of the “positive.”

While [the value of ambivalent feelings] has been recognized within Western academia only relatively recently, many cultures have long since acknowledged their significance.

Lomas says Eastern cultures, in particular, have a wealth of richly ambivalent words.

Mono no aware is a Japanese term for appreciating the transiency of life and its beauty, or recognizing that some things are beautiful in part because they’re impermanent.

“The prevalence and importance of mono no aware in Japanese culture may be attributed in part to the influence of Zen, the branch of Buddhism that flowered in Japan from the 12th century onward,” Lomas writes. “Mono no aware is an aesthetic approach to the cognizance of impermanence, which is central to Buddhist teaching.”

Soon after I read this, I learned about a nearby Zen Buddhist silent meditation retreat. Its theme was liberation from the fear of impermanence. It was meant to cultivate “wordless awareness,” which meant no speaking, no phones, no music, and no books. The idea of being without words for a whole weekend freaked me out, but I signed up anyway.

Liberation from fear of impermanence was something I could really use. Ever since my dad had a heart attack three years ago, I’ve been imagining his death and worrying excessively about when it will happen — What if he goes into cardiac arrest while I’m on a trip overseas and I can’t get back to him in time? Maybe I shouldn’t go on overseas trips! — and how I’ll cope.

When I arrived at the retreat, 20 participants wearing sweatpants and kind smiles — mostly retirees grappling with the looming prospect of their own death — sat in a circle. The retreat leader said we’d be working through the “Touchings of the Earth,” a series of exercises designed by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk famed for his teachings on mindfulness. The leader told us he would read three phrases, and after each one, we’d prostrate ourselves on the ground, where we’d lie for five minutes in contemplation.

I felt a bit uncomfortable about the prostrating bit because that’s not really part of my cultural lexicon, but before I knew it, he was intoning the first phrase: “Touching the earth, I connect with ancestors and descendants of both my spiritual and my blood families.”

Down I went with everyone else. Pretty soon, I realized the benefits of lying flat-out on my belly. It humbled me. And it let me imagine myself as a straight line through time, my feet in the past, my hands stretching into the future. I found myself thinking of my Indian great-great-grandmother, an orphan who at age 13 was sent on a rickety train from Calcutta to Bombay to marry a man three times her age.

I thought of all the choices she made to shield her son from violence and poverty, and how they filtered down through the generations, eventually conditioning the choices my dad made for me. All these choices were still shaping my life in palpable ways: my geography, my class, my psychological makeup. I was just starting to think about how my own choices will shape the lives of my potential future children when a bell rang and everyone stood up.

“Touching the earth, I connect with all people and all species which are alive at this moment in this world with me.”

This time I thought of climate change. I pictured all the species we’re losing, trying to visualize each bird, each bee. Now I was a horizontal line, connecting outward to other beings in the present, feeling how precarious they are. The bell rang; everyone stood.

“Touching the earth, I let go of my idea that I am this body and my lifespan is limited.”

Maybe because I’d just imagined myself as an infinite line, stretching out first vertically, then horizontally, it was surprisingly easy to let go of my notion of self as a bounded thing. If my great-great-grandmother’s choices were shaping the lives of my potential future children and my action or nonaction was shaping the lives of birds millions of miles away, what sense did it make to consider myself a separate individual?

As we repeated this exercise over the three-day retreat, I felt open and raw, a crustacean without her shell: soft everywhere. I realized I’d been scared of the prospect of my dad dying in part because I’m scared that his individual mind will no longer be able to speak to me, comfort me, or advise me with any real particularity. I’d hated the notion of his him-ness evanescing into some anonymous flow of consciousness, a drop of water that loses its identity in the ocean.

By the end of the retreat, I didn’t come to completely embrace that notion or magically lose all my fear. What I felt was subtler; I simply feared and hated a little less. Maybe it wasn’t so bad for our particular identities to be transient, if we continue to communicate with everyone and everything through the choices we’ve made. Maybe, as mono no aware suggests, there was even a bit of loveliness to it.

Even as happiness in the US has been decreasing, countries around the world have become more committed to studying, tracking, and increasing their citizens’ well-being.

Amid the global financial crisis, national happiness became the subject of policy conferences and college courses. France commissioned a study on it, which leading economists — Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi — completed in 2009. In 2011, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released its first well-being report on its member countries, and in 2012, the UN began releasing its annual World Happiness Report.

Several countries are now explicitly focused on boosting well-being. There’s Bhutan, which in 2008 enshrined “gross national happiness” in its Constitution. There’s the United Arab Emirates, which in 2016 appointed a minister of state for happiness. And there’s New Zealand, which earlier this year released the world’s first-ever “well-being budget.” To measure progress toward increased well-being and inform policy, the government there will use 61 indicators tracking everything from loneliness to water quality.

That’s important, because government decisions — and major social problems like racism — do a lot to condition and constrain the types of happiness citizens can access. Political and social change are crucial for increasing well-being; the onus can’t and shouldn’t fall squarely on the individual.

But the machinery of policy grinds slowly, and many individuals want to feel happier now. That’s where Lomas’s ideas may be useful.

Some types of well-being are ambivalent, containing both positive and negative valences

Of course, people looking to boost their happiness will find countless other recommendations out there. Many claims stemming from the $4 trillion “wellness” or “self-care” industry — that vaginal jade eggs can fix your hormone levels, say — are not evidence-based. But some other techniques are backed by research. For instance, Laurie Santos, a psychologist who teaches a Yale course on happiness (the university’s most popular class ever), has explained the efficacy of activities like gratitude journaling. Research has also shown that strong social relationships are crucial to well-being; anything we can do to reduce the toxic effects of loneliness is probably going to yield major dividends.

By comparison, how effective is Lomas’s language-learning intervention likely to be?

It’s an empirical question to which we don’t have an answer because it has barely been studied. (My own personal study, with a sample size of one, is nothing like a rigorous scientific trial.) It’s also a question that’s difficult to answer because Lomas’s proposal is actually many proposals. It involves cultivating a plethora of different positive experiences. Plus, you can cultivate them in different ways — and which way you choose matters.

“If Lomas’s intervention involves writing in a journal, that may overlap a lot with gratitude journaling,” said Katie Hoemann, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northeastern University who researches the interaction between language and emotion. “And if you’re doing the intervention in a social context, you’re probably getting social benefits, too.” The variables may be difficult to isolate.

Hoemann sounded a note of skepticism about the emotional granularity assumption underlying Lomas’s proposal. She noted that although studies have indeed shown a link between emotional granularity and better behavioral control in the face of negative feelings, the evidence that increasing granularity ups positive feelings is much thinner.

Janet Nicol, a professor of linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science at the University of Arizona, cast doubt on Lomas’s claim that learning untranslatable words may improve our well-being. “That kind of claim is just not supported by the evidence so far,” she said. “I think he’s overstating the effects.”

She imagined an experiment to test the hypothesis: Teach a bunch of people the Chinese principle of feng shui, have them rearrange the furniture in their homes accordingly, give them a well-being survey before and after, and measure the extent of improvement. “But in that case, is it the language that’s important or is it just the idea?” Nicol asked. “I don’t think they have to learn the foreign term feng shui in order to learn the idea.”

Nevertheless, Hoemann suggested there’s something here that merits serious investigation, because having a specific word for something does help us identify it. “It might seem like a small individual act to learn new words. But if there are many individuals doing it, there’s a snowball effect and it actually becomes part of our culture.”

In the meantime, people are still suggesting more words for Lomas’s online lexicon. He’s noticing trends in the types of well-being they tend to harp on — groupings that he thinks may reveal something about what human beings find most vital these days. When I asked him what theme is coming through strongest, he replied immediately: our relationship to nature.

The word dadirri, used in several Australian Aboriginal languages, describes a respectful deep listening to the natural world, a receptive state that can be healing. Lomas quotes Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann of the Ngangikurungkurr tribe, who explains, “When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness.”

Although I was under no illusion that I’d be able to experience dadirri as Ungunmerr-Baumann does, I thought I might try to explore it in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, where I spent a few days in October.

One morning, I woke up before dawn and went outside. I purposely brought no phone, no people, no distractions. As the sun rose, I sat on a rock and tried to listen. At first I heard only the loud birds who seemed to be in charge of screaming the world’s pain: Ow! Ow! Ow! Owwwwwww! Ow!

Slowly I began to hear subtler sounds. The water lapping at the land. The occasional swish of a fish breaking the surface and flumping back into the bay.

Each time I heard that flump, I swiveled around trying to see the fish that had produced it — until I realized that by the time you can turn your head, you’ll already have missed it. Better to keep your eyes focused on one patch of water, watching and listening.

Sure enough, several minutes later I was rewarded for my attention by the sight of a great dark fish rising above the surface.

I felt a quiet elation — and then gratitude toward the word dadirri for getting me to put myself in the way of this happiness. It’s not that I’d never experienced anything like it before, but having a word for it made me more purposeful about cultivating it and also helped me notice it as it was happening.

I found myself curious about the elation I felt. What is it that makes nature so restorative? I thought it must have to do with the way that, when we’re outdoors, we can more easily sense the interconnectedness of everything. We remember that we’re part of a vast and complex ecosystem, which has gone on long before us and will go on long after us. Knowing this helps to repair the breach we feel in times of loneliness and alienation between us and other beings. It offers the comfort of continuity, the conviction that even if we feel cut off, we’re not really — it’s only that our language has failed us.

After entertaining these wispy thoughts, I looked down to find that a spider had been busy literalizing my metaphor. She’d spun her silky strands across my limbs, making me an actual part of her web.

I laughed, thinking of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The happiness that alighted upon me then wasn’t a butterfly, but it was pretty damn close.

Sigal Samuel is a staff writer for Vox’s Future Perfect. She writes about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and the intersection of technology and religion. She previously wrote about anxiety apps for The Highlight.

Jordan Kay is an illustrator and animation dabbler based in Seattle, Washington.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/37pr3MW

[timalexanderdollery]

American happiness is plummeting. Could a few words change that?

A psychologist claims that learning “untranslatable words” from other cultures may be a key to being happy. I experimented on myself to see whether it’s true.

“Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

Screw that.

The saying, sometimes attributed to the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, cautions us to not pursue happiness aggressively; we’ve got to just let it come to us. But for many of us today, such 19th century romantic musings seem quaint, if not downright un-American.

The pursuit of happiness inscribed into the Declaration of Independence has grown into a national obsession. We compulsively compare ourselves to others, asking whether they’re happier than we are and why, and then we buy — a yoga studio membership, an empowerment seminar, an $80 Goop water bottle with a built-in rose quartz crystal — to stop losing the competition.

I admit that I, too, zealously hunt down happiness these days. I’ve had a rough couple of years. My dad had a heart attack. My apartment was burglarized. My knees were gripped by chronic pain so intense that, for a while, I could barely walk.

So when I stumbled across the work of Tim Lomas, I pounced on his books, butterfly net in hand. A lecturer at the University of East London, Lomas specializes in a field known as positive psychology, the study of what makes human beings happy. Not just happy in the narrow sense, like the fleeting joy you get from ice cream, but in the broader sense of human flourishing — what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia. Positive psychologists research which factors are the biggest contributors to well-being, from income level to relationships to religiosity.

Lomas has recently published a trio of works on the connection between well-being and language: The Happiness Dictionary, Translating Happiness, and Happiness Found in Translation, his illustrated chapbook published this fall. In them, he says most of us in the West aren’t as happy as we could be, in part because we have a limited definition of happiness. Other cultures have concepts of well-being that are vastly different from ours, but because they’re expressed in languages we don’t understand, Lomas argues, we’re missing out on the insights they embody.

So in 2015, Lomas started the Positive Lexicography Project, a crowdsourced treasury of global terms of well-being, everything from fjaka (Croatian for “the sweetness of doing nothing”) to ubuntu (Zulu for “a spirit of universal kindness and common humanity: I am because you are”).

With the help of far-flung strangers on the internet, he’s since mined 140 languages to come up with a whopping 1,200 words. Each has its own unique shades of meaning not fully captured in English translation. He argues that engaging with these “untranslatable” terms can help us imagine, and ultimately experience, more types of well-being.

And a sense of well-being seems to be in short supply in the US. Americans are only becoming more miserable, according to the World Happiness Report. In 2019, the US dropped in the rankings for the third year in a row, coming in 19th place. Experts blame the decline on various factors, including the deadliest drug overdose crisis in our history, ever-higher levels of anxiety in annual surveys, and decreased trust in politicians and other public figures.

Against this backdrop, it’s easy to understand why the emerging field of positive psychology has grown popular both in academia and among the public. And given that the American hunt for happiness is turning out to be pretty unsuccessful, it’s not surprising that proposals such as Lomas’s — which suggest turning to other cultures for insight — exert a seductive pull.

When I called Lomas at his home in London, he told me one of his favorite words is wabi sabi, which is Japanese for “imperfect, weathered, rustic beauty.” The term puts him in a different frame of mind, letting him see things with new eyes.

“Right now I’m looking out at my garden,” he said. “There’s some broken pots there. So I’m thinking, is there a way to look at these pots in such a way that, even though they’re imperfect and old, I see there really is a beauty to them?”

Words like these are tantalizing because they’re so much more than just single words — they’re lexical powerhouses that seem to contain entire worldviews. They let us see how other cultures parse their experiences, offering us more options for how we might understand and live ours.

“In positive psychology, interventions might involve recalling a positive experience and writing about it for 20 minutes, or just sitting and meditating on it,” Lomas said. “With wabi sabi, you could send people away for 24 hours and say, ‘Try and notice this wherever possible and keep a diary on those experiences.’”

Psychologists have adopted a term for the ability to distinguish between feelings in an extra-nuanced way: They call it “emotional granularity.” For example, English has words like pleasure, satisfaction, and pride, but they don’t allow you to differentiate between the pride you feel for a friend whose accomplishment you’re also a tad jealous of, and the pride you feel for a friend whom you’re genuinely, 100 percent happy for. Yet Hebrew has a word for the latter — firgun — which describes total ungrudging and overt pride in another’s success. And German has a word for the opposite of firgun: schadenfreude.

Several studies suggest that increasing emotional granularity is good for our mental and physical health. It makes us more aware of our subjective experiences, which in turn makes it easier for us to regulate our emotions and maintain equanimity. It’s a souped-up version of what we do with preschoolers: We teach them to identify their feelings — “I’m mad” or “I’m sad” — which is the first step toward learning how to manage them.

Lomas says we should try doing the same thing as adults but with untranslatable words, so that we add ever more complexity to our emotional vocabularies. Writing in Translating Happiness, he says he’d want to see “a pilot study, followed by larger-scale empirical testing, randomized controlled trials, replication studies, and meta-analyses. These studies could use psychometric scales to assess the extent of improvement.”

Although I’m in no position to conduct a scientific study, I felt a certain frisson (that’s French for “a spine-tingling shiver of excitement”) when I read this. I wondered what would happen if I picked a few untranslatable words and tried to cultivate the types of well-being they embody.

I knew I had no hope of feeling my way into these words the same way they’d be experienced by someone who’s spent a lifetime steeped in the cultural tradition that gave rise to them. For me to try to access these words outside of their original context would inevitably be to impoverish and distort them. Still, I wondered if spending a little time trying to learn from them would make it possible to experience the world just a bit differently.

I began to plan my experiments.

As a teenager, I used to dance salsa and flamenco. But recently? Not so much. Over the past few years, a chronic pain in my knees that no doctor could explain or treat kept me from dancing. Which is to say, it kept me from the activity that helped get me out of my head and into my body, that replaced worry with sensation. Happily, this year the pain finally subsided, and so I figured it was time to give duende a shot.

Duende is Spanish for a heightened state of passionate emotion that you experience through art, especially dance. The poet Federico García Lorca said having duende is “not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins … it burns the blood like powdered glass, it exhausts, it rejects all the sweet geometry we understand.” And according to Lomas, “The term derives from a magical elf-like creature in Spanish mythology, which suggests the nonrational and otherworldly nature of the mental state duende signifies.”

One weekend, I saw online that a club near my house was hosting a Cuban dance party. The party didn’t start until 11 pm and my elder-millennial friends could not be corralled off their couches at such an ungodly hour. So I went alone, figuring I’d do fine.

Nope. Not fine at all. Everyone there was intimidatingly fantastic at salsa dancing! The men’s footwork was so fast that their shoes blurred into invisibility; the women were all hips, dresses describing sexy circles in the air as they spun. I stood with my back pasted to the wall and guzzled rum.

Eventually, I forced myself to find a partner and hit the dance floor. As he cut confidently through the air, I felt like a penguin in his arms, flightless and waddling pathetically. My confidence level did not rise over the next few hours. Each dancer was somehow better than the last, and I was way too self-conscious to feel the passionate, out-of-your-mind ecstasy of duende. It’s hard to feel mystically transported when you’re worried about stepping on some hot guy’s toes.

And although I hated to admit it, the quote attributed to Hawthorne did seem to be on-point: Trying to manufacture joy can make it even harder to access.

It was 2 am when, pasted to the wall again, guzzling water this time, I finally met someone as clueless as I was. I asked him how it was that everyone there was an amazing dancer. “Didn’t you know?” he asked. “These are professionals. Half of them own their own studios in the area.” I exploded into laughter. How did I pick the one club in town where everyone was a goddamn dance instructor?

Knowing that helped me loosen up. The guy and I danced together, laughing at ourselves. I started to actually have fun. We spun each other around. We tangoed across the floor. We jumped onto the sides of pillars and kicked off from them, flying, however briefly, through the air. It was not really duende, but it was a joy I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

The underlying premise of Lomas’s work is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — a theory, proposed by linguist Edward Sapir in 1929 and later developed by his student Benjamin Whorf — that our language shapes what we’re capable of thinking and feeling. The strong version of the hypothesis, linguistic determinism, holds that you can’t experience a feeling the same way if you don’t have a word for it. Linguists critiqued that view heavily in the 1960s and ’70s, and it remains unpopular these days.

But a milder one, linguistic relativity, is still embraced by some scholars, including Lomas. It holds that language influences experience but doesn’t determine it.

Even linguistic relativity is controversial, though. Some linguists, like John McWhorter, insist that “the world looks the same in any language” — and argue that claiming otherwise risks fetishizing some cultures (“Italians are a romantic people”) and demeaning others. I share some of that concern. As a woman of color whose family hails from India, Iraq, and Morocco, I’m always wary of ideas with the potential to Orientalize or exoticize. At the same time, I wanted to engage with Lomas’s ideas in good faith.

Words like these are lexical powerhouses

If you find it hard to believe that engaging with untranslatable words can actually increase your well-being, Lomas told me, consider sati. That’s a Pali word from India that you may have seen translated as mindfulness, though many meditators prefer to leave it untranslated, saying the English term is too cerebral to capture the emotional and ethical valences of the original. (Sati also has a very different unrelated meaning among some Indians and Nepalese.)

In the West, sati has been popularized by people like Jon Kabat-Zinn, a scientist who founded the Center for Mindfulness and who in the 1970s developed an eight-week course for people in clinical settings, which he called mindfulness-based stress reduction. Other American teachers, such as Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, have brought mindfulness practice sessions to the masses. Countless mindfulness apps have also embedded the concept firmly in our cultural lexicon. Lomas points to the rise of sati as evidence that Westerners can study an untranslatable phenomenon, create exercises for cultivating it, and through that measurably improve people’s well-being.

“People looked into sati and built a set of practices around it. That’s been so valuable,” Lomas told me. “Surely there are various other words you could explore in a similar way.”

But by and large, people haven’t yet done that. He’s currently collaborating with scholars in Spain and Japan to see if they can come up with exercises that will help people develop an experiential understanding of untranslatable terms.

Yet just as you need many, many hours of practice to develop mindfulness as a permanently altered trait rather than a temporarily altered state, cultivating different types of well-being will require more than a single exercise to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

It will also require that Westerners expand our notion of happiness. Some types of well-being, Lomas writes, don’t come in purely pleasurable packets — they’re ambivalent, containing both positive and negative valences. Think of the Italian word magari, which suggests a sense of “maybe, possibly,” the wistful hope of “if only.” Or the Amharic word tizita, which means “a bittersweet remembrance and longing for a time, person, or thing gone by.” Lomas writes:

Psychologists are increasingly appreciative of such feelings, as seen in an emergent body of work that my colleagues and I refer to as “second-wave” positive psychology. When positive psychology was initiated in the 1990s, it defined itself by focusing on positive emotions and qualities. Before long, however, scholars started to critique this foundational [Western] concept of the “positive.”

While [the value of ambivalent feelings] has been recognized within Western academia only relatively recently, many cultures have long since acknowledged their significance.

Lomas says Eastern cultures, in particular, have a wealth of richly ambivalent words.

Mono no aware is a Japanese term for appreciating the transiency of life and its beauty, or recognizing that some things are beautiful in part because they’re impermanent.

“The prevalence and importance of mono no aware in Japanese culture may be attributed in part to the influence of Zen, the branch of Buddhism that flowered in Japan from the 12th century onward,” Lomas writes. “Mono no aware is an aesthetic approach to the cognizance of impermanence, which is central to Buddhist teaching.”

Soon after I read this, I learned about a nearby Zen Buddhist silent meditation retreat. Its theme was liberation from the fear of impermanence. It was meant to cultivate “wordless awareness,” which meant no speaking, no phones, no music, and no books. The idea of being without words for a whole weekend freaked me out, but I signed up anyway.

Liberation from fear of impermanence was something I could really use. Ever since my dad had a heart attack three years ago, I’ve been imagining his death and worrying excessively about when it will happen — What if he goes into cardiac arrest while I’m on a trip overseas and I can’t get back to him in time? Maybe I shouldn’t go on overseas trips! — and how I’ll cope.

When I arrived at the retreat, 20 participants wearing sweatpants and kind smiles — mostly retirees grappling with the looming prospect of their own death — sat in a circle. The retreat leader said we’d be working through the “Touchings of the Earth,” a series of exercises designed by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk famed for his teachings on mindfulness. The leader told us he would read three phrases, and after each one, we’d prostrate ourselves on the ground, where we’d lie for five minutes in contemplation.

I felt a bit uncomfortable about the prostrating bit because that’s not really part of my cultural lexicon, but before I knew it, he was intoning the first phrase: “Touching the earth, I connect with ancestors and descendants of both my spiritual and my blood families.”

Down I went with everyone else. Pretty soon, I realized the benefits of lying flat-out on my belly. It humbled me. And it let me imagine myself as a straight line through time, my feet in the past, my hands stretching into the future. I found myself thinking of my Indian great-great-grandmother, an orphan who at age 13 was sent on a rickety train from Calcutta to Bombay to marry a man three times her age.

I thought of all the choices she made to shield her son from violence and poverty, and how they filtered down through the generations, eventually conditioning the choices my dad made for me. All these choices were still shaping my life in palpable ways: my geography, my class, my psychological makeup. I was just starting to think about how my own choices will shape the lives of my potential future children when a bell rang and everyone stood up.

“Touching the earth, I connect with all people and all species which are alive at this moment in this world with me.”

This time I thought of climate change. I pictured all the species we’re losing, trying to visualize each bird, each bee. Now I was a horizontal line, connecting outward to other beings in the present, feeling how precarious they are. The bell rang; everyone stood.

“Touching the earth, I let go of my idea that I am this body and my lifespan is limited.”

Maybe because I’d just imagined myself as an infinite line, stretching out first vertically, then horizontally, it was surprisingly easy to let go of my notion of self as a bounded thing. If my great-great-grandmother’s choices were shaping the lives of my potential future children and my action or nonaction was shaping the lives of birds millions of miles away, what sense did it make to consider myself a separate individual?

As we repeated this exercise over the three-day retreat, I felt open and raw, a crustacean without her shell: soft everywhere. I realized I’d been scared of the prospect of my dad dying in part because I’m scared that his individual mind will no longer be able to speak to me, comfort me, or advise me with any real particularity. I’d hated the notion of his him-ness evanescing into some anonymous flow of consciousness, a drop of water that loses its identity in the ocean.

By the end of the retreat, I didn’t come to completely embrace that notion or magically lose all my fear. What I felt was subtler; I simply feared and hated a little less. Maybe it wasn’t so bad for our particular identities to be transient, if we continue to communicate with everyone and everything through the choices we’ve made. Maybe, as mono no aware suggests, there was even a bit of loveliness to it.

Even as happiness in the US has been decreasing, countries around the world have become more committed to studying, tracking, and increasing their citizens’ well-being.

Amid the global financial crisis, national happiness became the subject of policy conferences and college courses. France commissioned a study on it, which leading economists — Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi — completed in 2009. In 2011, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released its first well-being report on its member countries, and in 2012, the UN began releasing its annual World Happiness Report.

Several countries are now explicitly focused on boosting well-being. There’s Bhutan, which in 2008 enshrined “gross national happiness” in its Constitution. There’s the United Arab Emirates, which in 2016 appointed a minister of state for happiness. And there’s New Zealand, which earlier this year released the world’s first-ever “well-being budget.” To measure progress toward increased well-being and inform policy, the government there will use 61 indicators tracking everything from loneliness to water quality.

That’s important, because government decisions — and major social problems like racism — do a lot to condition and constrain the types of happiness citizens can access. Political and social change are crucial for increasing well-being; the onus can’t and shouldn’t fall squarely on the individual.

But the machinery of policy grinds slowly, and many individuals want to feel happier now. That’s where Lomas’s ideas may be useful.

Some types of well-being are ambivalent, containing both positive and negative valences

Of course, people looking to boost their happiness will find countless other recommendations out there. Many claims stemming from the $4 trillion “wellness” or “self-care” industry — that vaginal jade eggs can fix your hormone levels, say — are not evidence-based. But some other techniques are backed by research. For instance, Laurie Santos, a psychologist who teaches a Yale course on happiness (the university’s most popular class ever), has explained the efficacy of activities like gratitude journaling. Research has also shown that strong social relationships are crucial to well-being; anything we can do to reduce the toxic effects of loneliness is probably going to yield major dividends.

By comparison, how effective is Lomas’s language-learning intervention likely to be?

It’s an empirical question to which we don’t have an answer because it has barely been studied. (My own personal study, with a sample size of one, is nothing like a rigorous scientific trial.) It’s also a question that’s difficult to answer because Lomas’s proposal is actually many proposals. It involves cultivating a plethora of different positive experiences. Plus, you can cultivate them in different ways — and which way you choose matters.

“If Lomas’s intervention involves writing in a journal, that may overlap a lot with gratitude journaling,” said Katie Hoemann, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northeastern University who researches the interaction between language and emotion. “And if you’re doing the intervention in a social context, you’re probably getting social benefits, too.” The variables may be difficult to isolate.

Hoemann sounded a note of skepticism about the emotional granularity assumption underlying Lomas’s proposal. She noted that although studies have indeed shown a link between emotional granularity and better behavioral control in the face of negative feelings, the evidence that increasing granularity ups positive feelings is much thinner.

Janet Nicol, a professor of linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science at the University of Arizona, cast doubt on Lomas’s claim that learning untranslatable words may improve our well-being. “That kind of claim is just not supported by the evidence so far,” she said. “I think he’s overstating the effects.”

She imagined an experiment to test the hypothesis: Teach a bunch of people the Chinese principle of feng shui, have them rearrange the furniture in their homes accordingly, give them a well-being survey before and after, and measure the extent of improvement. “But in that case, is it the language that’s important or is it just the idea?” Nicol asked. “I don’t think they have to learn the foreign term feng shui in order to learn the idea.”

Nevertheless, Hoemann suggested there’s something here that merits serious investigation, because having a specific word for something does help us identify it. “It might seem like a small individual act to learn new words. But if there are many individuals doing it, there’s a snowball effect and it actually becomes part of our culture.”

In the meantime, people are still suggesting more words for Lomas’s online lexicon. He’s noticing trends in the types of well-being they tend to harp on — groupings that he thinks may reveal something about what human beings find most vital these days. When I asked him what theme is coming through strongest, he replied immediately: our relationship to nature.

The word dadirri, used in several Australian Aboriginal languages, describes a respectful deep listening to the natural world, a receptive state that can be healing. Lomas quotes Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann of the Ngangikurungkurr tribe, who explains, “When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness.”

Although I was under no illusion that I’d be able to experience dadirri as Ungunmerr-Baumann does, I thought I might try to explore it in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, where I spent a few days in October.

One morning, I woke up before dawn and went outside. I purposely brought no phone, no people, no distractions. As the sun rose, I sat on a rock and tried to listen. At first I heard only the loud birds who seemed to be in charge of screaming the world’s pain: Ow! Ow! Ow! Owwwwwww! Ow!

Slowly I began to hear subtler sounds. The water lapping at the land. The occasional swish of a fish breaking the surface and flumping back into the bay.

Each time I heard that flump, I swiveled around trying to see the fish that had produced it — until I realized that by the time you can turn your head, you’ll already have missed it. Better to keep your eyes focused on one patch of water, watching and listening.

Sure enough, several minutes later I was rewarded for my attention by the sight of a great dark fish rising above the surface.

I felt a quiet elation — and then gratitude toward the word dadirri for getting me to put myself in the way of this happiness. It’s not that I’d never experienced anything like it before, but having a word for it made me more purposeful about cultivating it and also helped me notice it as it was happening.

I found myself curious about the elation I felt. What is it that makes nature so restorative? I thought it must have to do with the way that, when we’re outdoors, we can more easily sense the interconnectedness of everything. We remember that we’re part of a vast and complex ecosystem, which has gone on long before us and will go on long after us. Knowing this helps to repair the breach we feel in times of loneliness and alienation between us and other beings. It offers the comfort of continuity, the conviction that even if we feel cut off, we’re not really — it’s only that our language has failed us.

After entertaining these wispy thoughts, I looked down to find that a spider had been busy literalizing my metaphor. She’d spun her silky strands across my limbs, making me an actual part of her web.

I laughed, thinking of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The happiness that alighted upon me then wasn’t a butterfly, but it was pretty damn close.

Sigal Samuel is a staff writer for Vox’s Future Perfect. She writes about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and the intersection of technology and religion. She previously wrote about anxiety apps for The Highlight.

Jordan Kay is an illustrator and animation dabbler based in Seattle, Washington.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/37pr3MW

[corneliusreignallen]

American happiness is plummeting. Could a few words change that?

A psychologist claims that learning “untranslatable words” from other cultures may be a key to being happy. I experimented on myself to see whether it’s true.

“Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

Screw that.

The saying, sometimes attributed to the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, cautions us to not pursue happiness aggressively; we’ve got to just let it come to us. But for many of us today, such 19th century romantic musings seem quaint, if not downright un-American.

The pursuit of happiness inscribed into the Declaration of Independence has grown into a national obsession. We compulsively compare ourselves to others, asking whether they’re happier than we are and why, and then we buy — a yoga studio membership, an empowerment seminar, an $80 Goop water bottle with a built-in rose quartz crystal — to stop losing the competition.

I admit that I, too, zealously hunt down happiness these days. I’ve had a rough couple of years. My dad had a heart attack. My apartment was burglarized. My knees were gripped by chronic pain so intense that, for a while, I could barely walk.

So when I stumbled across the work of Tim Lomas, I pounced on his books, butterfly net in hand. A lecturer at the University of East London, Lomas specializes in a field known as positive psychology, the study of what makes human beings happy. Not just happy in the narrow sense, like the fleeting joy you get from ice cream, but in the broader sense of human flourishing — what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia. Positive psychologists research which factors are the biggest contributors to well-being, from income level to relationships to religiosity.

Lomas has recently published a trio of works on the connection between well-being and language: The Happiness Dictionary, Translating Happiness, and Happiness Found in Translation, his illustrated chapbook published this fall. In them, he says most of us in the West aren’t as happy as we could be, in part because we have a limited definition of happiness. Other cultures have concepts of well-being that are vastly different from ours, but because they’re expressed in languages we don’t understand, Lomas argues, we’re missing out on the insights they embody.

So in 2015, Lomas started the Positive Lexicography Project, a crowdsourced treasury of global terms of well-being, everything from fjaka (Croatian for “the sweetness of doing nothing”) to ubuntu (Zulu for “a spirit of universal kindness and common humanity: I am because you are”).

With the help of far-flung strangers on the internet, he’s since mined 140 languages to come up with a whopping 1,200 words. Each has its own unique shades of meaning not fully captured in English translation. He argues that engaging with these “untranslatable” terms can help us imagine, and ultimately experience, more types of well-being.

And a sense of well-being seems to be in short supply in the US. Americans are only becoming more miserable, according to the World Happiness Report. In 2019, the US dropped in the rankings for the third year in a row, coming in 19th place. Experts blame the decline on various factors, including the deadliest drug overdose crisis in our history, ever-higher levels of anxiety in annual surveys, and decreased trust in politicians and other public figures.

Against this backdrop, it’s easy to understand why the emerging field of positive psychology has grown popular both in academia and among the public. And given that the American hunt for happiness is turning out to be pretty unsuccessful, it’s not surprising that proposals such as Lomas’s — which suggest turning to other cultures for insight — exert a seductive pull.

When I called Lomas at his home in London, he told me one of his favorite words is wabi sabi, which is Japanese for “imperfect, weathered, rustic beauty.” The term puts him in a different frame of mind, letting him see things with new eyes.

“Right now I’m looking out at my garden,” he said. “There’s some broken pots there. So I’m thinking, is there a way to look at these pots in such a way that, even though they’re imperfect and old, I see there really is a beauty to them?”

Words like these are tantalizing because they’re so much more than just single words — they’re lexical powerhouses that seem to contain entire worldviews. They let us see how other cultures parse their experiences, offering us more options for how we might understand and live ours.

“In positive psychology, interventions might involve recalling a positive experience and writing about it for 20 minutes, or just sitting and meditating on it,” Lomas said. “With wabi sabi, you could send people away for 24 hours and say, ‘Try and notice this wherever possible and keep a diary on those experiences.’”

Psychologists have adopted a term for the ability to distinguish between feelings in an extra-nuanced way: They call it “emotional granularity.” For example, English has words like pleasure, satisfaction, and pride, but they don’t allow you to differentiate between the pride you feel for a friend whose accomplishment you’re also a tad jealous of, and the pride you feel for a friend whom you’re genuinely, 100 percent happy for. Yet Hebrew has a word for the latter — firgun — which describes total ungrudging and overt pride in another’s success. And German has a word for the opposite of firgun: schadenfreude.

Several studies suggest that increasing emotional granularity is good for our mental and physical health. It makes us more aware of our subjective experiences, which in turn makes it easier for us to regulate our emotions and maintain equanimity. It’s a souped-up version of what we do with preschoolers: We teach them to identify their feelings — “I’m mad” or “I’m sad” — which is the first step toward learning how to manage them.

Lomas says we should try doing the same thing as adults but with untranslatable words, so that we add ever more complexity to our emotional vocabularies. Writing in Translating Happiness, he says he’d want to see “a pilot study, followed by larger-scale empirical testing, randomized controlled trials, replication studies, and meta-analyses. These studies could use psychometric scales to assess the extent of improvement.”

Although I’m in no position to conduct a scientific study, I felt a certain frisson (that’s French for “a spine-tingling shiver of excitement”) when I read this. I wondered what would happen if I picked a few untranslatable words and tried to cultivate the types of well-being they embody.

I knew I had no hope of feeling my way into these words the same way they’d be experienced by someone who’s spent a lifetime steeped in the cultural tradition that gave rise to them. For me to try to access these words outside of their original context would inevitably be to impoverish and distort them. Still, I wondered if spending a little time trying to learn from them would make it possible to experience the world just a bit differently.

I began to plan my experiments.

As a teenager, I used to dance salsa and flamenco. But recently? Not so much. Over the past few years, a chronic pain in my knees that no doctor could explain or treat kept me from dancing. Which is to say, it kept me from the activity that helped get me out of my head and into my body, that replaced worry with sensation. Happily, this year the pain finally subsided, and so I figured it was time to give duende a shot.

Duende is Spanish for a heightened state of passionate emotion that you experience through art, especially dance. The poet Federico García Lorca said having duende is “not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins … it burns the blood like powdered glass, it exhausts, it rejects all the sweet geometry we understand.” And according to Lomas, “The term derives from a magical elf-like creature in Spanish mythology, which suggests the nonrational and otherworldly nature of the mental state duende signifies.”

One weekend, I saw online that a club near my house was hosting a Cuban dance party. The party didn’t start until 11 pm and my elder-millennial friends could not be corralled off their couches at such an ungodly hour. So I went alone, figuring I’d do fine.

Nope. Not fine at all. Everyone there was intimidatingly fantastic at salsa dancing! The men’s footwork was so fast that their shoes blurred into invisibility; the women were all hips, dresses describing sexy circles in the air as they spun. I stood with my back pasted to the wall and guzzled rum.

Eventually, I forced myself to find a partner and hit the dance floor. As he cut confidently through the air, I felt like a penguin in his arms, flightless and waddling pathetically. My confidence level did not rise over the next few hours. Each dancer was somehow better than the last, and I was way too self-conscious to feel the passionate, out-of-your-mind ecstasy of duende. It’s hard to feel mystically transported when you’re worried about stepping on some hot guy’s toes.

And although I hated to admit it, the quote attributed to Hawthorne did seem to be on-point: Trying to manufacture joy can make it even harder to access.

It was 2 am when, pasted to the wall again, guzzling water this time, I finally met someone as clueless as I was. I asked him how it was that everyone there was an amazing dancer. “Didn’t you know?” he asked. “These are professionals. Half of them own their own studios in the area.” I exploded into laughter. How did I pick the one club in town where everyone was a goddamn dance instructor?

Knowing that helped me loosen up. The guy and I danced together, laughing at ourselves. I started to actually have fun. We spun each other around. We tangoed across the floor. We jumped onto the sides of pillars and kicked off from them, flying, however briefly, through the air. It was not really duende, but it was a joy I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

The underlying premise of Lomas’s work is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — a theory, proposed by linguist Edward Sapir in 1929 and later developed by his student Benjamin Whorf — that our language shapes what we’re capable of thinking and feeling. The strong version of the hypothesis, linguistic determinism, holds that you can’t experience a feeling the same way if you don’t have a word for it. Linguists critiqued that view heavily in the 1960s and ’70s, and it remains unpopular these days.

But a milder one, linguistic relativity, is still embraced by some scholars, including Lomas. It holds that language influences experience but doesn’t determine it.

Even linguistic relativity is controversial, though. Some linguists, like John McWhorter, insist that “the world looks the same in any language” — and argue that claiming otherwise risks fetishizing some cultures (“Italians are a romantic people”) and demeaning others. I share some of that concern. As a woman of color whose family hails from India, Iraq, and Morocco, I’m always wary of ideas with the potential to Orientalize or exoticize. At the same time, I wanted to engage with Lomas’s ideas in good faith.

Words like these are lexical powerhouses

If you find it hard to believe that engaging with untranslatable words can actually increase your well-being, Lomas told me, consider sati. That’s a Pali word from India that you may have seen translated as mindfulness, though many meditators prefer to leave it untranslated, saying the English term is too cerebral to capture the emotional and ethical valences of the original. (Sati also has a very different unrelated meaning among some Indians and Nepalese.)

In the West, sati has been popularized by people like Jon Kabat-Zinn, a scientist who founded the Center for Mindfulness and who in the 1970s developed an eight-week course for people in clinical settings, which he called mindfulness-based stress reduction. Other American teachers, such as Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, have brought mindfulness practice sessions to the masses. Countless mindfulness apps have also embedded the concept firmly in our cultural lexicon. Lomas points to the rise of sati as evidence that Westerners can study an untranslatable phenomenon, create exercises for cultivating it, and through that measurably improve people’s well-being.

“People looked into sati and built a set of practices around it. That’s been so valuable,” Lomas told me. “Surely there are various other words you could explore in a similar way.”

But by and large, people haven’t yet done that. He’s currently collaborating with scholars in Spain and Japan to see if they can come up with exercises that will help people develop an experiential understanding of untranslatable terms.

Yet just as you need many, many hours of practice to develop mindfulness as a permanently altered trait rather than a temporarily altered state, cultivating different types of well-being will require more than a single exercise to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

It will also require that Westerners expand our notion of happiness. Some types of well-being, Lomas writes, don’t come in purely pleasurable packets — they’re ambivalent, containing both positive and negative valences. Think of the Italian word magari, which suggests a sense of “maybe, possibly,” the wistful hope of “if only.” Or the Amharic word tizita, which means “a bittersweet remembrance and longing for a time, person, or thing gone by.” Lomas writes:

Psychologists are increasingly appreciative of such feelings, as seen in an emergent body of work that my colleagues and I refer to as “second-wave” positive psychology. When positive psychology was initiated in the 1990s, it defined itself by focusing on positive emotions and qualities. Before long, however, scholars started to critique this foundational [Western] concept of the “positive.”

While [the value of ambivalent feelings] has been recognized within Western academia only relatively recently, many cultures have long since acknowledged their significance.

Lomas says Eastern cultures, in particular, have a wealth of richly ambivalent words.

Mono no aware is a Japanese term for appreciating the transiency of life and its beauty, or recognizing that some things are beautiful in part because they’re impermanent.

“The prevalence and importance of mono no aware in Japanese culture may be attributed in part to the influence of Zen, the branch of Buddhism that flowered in Japan from the 12th century onward,” Lomas writes. “Mono no aware is an aesthetic approach to the cognizance of impermanence, which is central to Buddhist teaching.”

Soon after I read this, I learned about a nearby Zen Buddhist silent meditation retreat. Its theme was liberation from the fear of impermanence. It was meant to cultivate “wordless awareness,” which meant no speaking, no phones, no music, and no books. The idea of being without words for a whole weekend freaked me out, but I signed up anyway.

Liberation from fear of impermanence was something I could really use. Ever since my dad had a heart attack three years ago, I’ve been imagining his death and worrying excessively about when it will happen — What if he goes into cardiac arrest while I’m on a trip overseas and I can’t get back to him in time? Maybe I shouldn’t go on overseas trips! — and how I’ll cope.

When I arrived at the retreat, 20 participants wearing sweatpants and kind smiles — mostly retirees grappling with the looming prospect of their own death — sat in a circle. The retreat leader said we’d be working through the “Touchings of the Earth,” a series of exercises designed by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk famed for his teachings on mindfulness. The leader told us he would read three phrases, and after each one, we’d prostrate ourselves on the ground, where we’d lie for five minutes in contemplation.

I felt a bit uncomfortable about the prostrating bit because that’s not really part of my cultural lexicon, but before I knew it, he was intoning the first phrase: “Touching the earth, I connect with ancestors and descendants of both my spiritual and my blood families.”

Down I went with everyone else. Pretty soon, I realized the benefits of lying flat-out on my belly. It humbled me. And it let me imagine myself as a straight line through time, my feet in the past, my hands stretching into the future. I found myself thinking of my Indian great-great-grandmother, an orphan who at age 13 was sent on a rickety train from Calcutta to Bombay to marry a man three times her age.

I thought of all the choices she made to shield her son from violence and poverty, and how they filtered down through the generations, eventually conditioning the choices my dad made for me. All these choices were still shaping my life in palpable ways: my geography, my class, my psychological makeup. I was just starting to think about how my own choices will shape the lives of my potential future children when a bell rang and everyone stood up.

“Touching the earth, I connect with all people and all species which are alive at this moment in this world with me.”

This time I thought of climate change. I pictured all the species we’re losing, trying to visualize each bird, each bee. Now I was a horizontal line, connecting outward to other beings in the present, feeling how precarious they are. The bell rang; everyone stood.

“Touching the earth, I let go of my idea that I am this body and my lifespan is limited.”

Maybe because I’d just imagined myself as an infinite line, stretching out first vertically, then horizontally, it was surprisingly easy to let go of my notion of self as a bounded thing. If my great-great-grandmother’s choices were shaping the lives of my potential future children and my action or nonaction was shaping the lives of birds millions of miles away, what sense did it make to consider myself a separate individual?

As we repeated this exercise over the three-day retreat, I felt open and raw, a crustacean without her shell: soft everywhere. I realized I’d been scared of the prospect of my dad dying in part because I’m scared that his individual mind will no longer be able to speak to me, comfort me, or advise me with any real particularity. I’d hated the notion of his him-ness evanescing into some anonymous flow of consciousness, a drop of water that loses its identity in the ocean.

By the end of the retreat, I didn’t come to completely embrace that notion or magically lose all my fear. What I felt was subtler; I simply feared and hated a little less. Maybe it wasn’t so bad for our particular identities to be transient, if we continue to communicate with everyone and everything through the choices we’ve made. Maybe, as mono no aware suggests, there was even a bit of loveliness to it.

Even as happiness in the US has been decreasing, countries around the world have become more committed to studying, tracking, and increasing their citizens’ well-being.

Amid the global financial crisis, national happiness became the subject of policy conferences and college courses. France commissioned a study on it, which leading economists — Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi — completed in 2009. In 2011, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released its first well-being report on its member countries, and in 2012, the UN began releasing its annual World Happiness Report.

Several countries are now explicitly focused on boosting well-being. There’s Bhutan, which in 2008 enshrined “gross national happiness” in its Constitution. There’s the United Arab Emirates, which in 2016 appointed a minister of state for happiness. And there’s New Zealand, which earlier this year released the world’s first-ever “well-being budget.” To measure progress toward increased well-being and inform policy, the government there will use 61 indicators tracking everything from loneliness to water quality.

That’s important, because government decisions — and major social problems like racism — do a lot to condition and constrain the types of happiness citizens can access. Political and social change are crucial for increasing well-being; the onus can’t and shouldn’t fall squarely on the individual.

But the machinery of policy grinds slowly, and many individuals want to feel happier now. That’s where Lomas’s ideas may be useful.

Some types of well-being are ambivalent, containing both positive and negative valences

Of course, people looking to boost their happiness will find countless other recommendations out there. Many claims stemming from the $4 trillion “wellness” or “self-care” industry — that vaginal jade eggs can fix your hormone levels, say — are not evidence-based. But some other techniques are backed by research. For instance, Laurie Santos, a psychologist who teaches a Yale course on happiness (the university’s most popular class ever), has explained the efficacy of activities like gratitude journaling. Research has also shown that strong social relationships are crucial to well-being; anything we can do to reduce the toxic effects of loneliness is probably going to yield major dividends.

By comparison, how effective is Lomas’s language-learning intervention likely to be?

It’s an empirical question to which we don’t have an answer because it has barely been studied. (My own personal study, with a sample size of one, is nothing like a rigorous scientific trial.) It’s also a question that’s difficult to answer because Lomas’s proposal is actually many proposals. It involves cultivating a plethora of different positive experiences. Plus, you can cultivate them in different ways — and which way you choose matters.

“If Lomas’s intervention involves writing in a journal, that may overlap a lot with gratitude journaling,” said Katie Hoemann, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northeastern University who researches the interaction between language and emotion. “And if you’re doing the intervention in a social context, you’re probably getting social benefits, too.” The variables may be difficult to isolate.

Hoemann sounded a note of skepticism about the emotional granularity assumption underlying Lomas’s proposal. She noted that although studies have indeed shown a link between emotional granularity and better behavioral control in the face of negative feelings, the evidence that increasing granularity ups positive feelings is much thinner.

Janet Nicol, a professor of linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science at the University of Arizona, cast doubt on Lomas’s claim that learning untranslatable words may improve our well-being. “That kind of claim is just not supported by the evidence so far,” she said. “I think he’s overstating the effects.”

She imagined an experiment to test the hypothesis: Teach a bunch of people the Chinese principle of feng shui, have them rearrange the furniture in their homes accordingly, give them a well-being survey before and after, and measure the extent of improvement. “But in that case, is it the language that’s important or is it just the idea?” Nicol asked. “I don’t think they have to learn the foreign term feng shui in order to learn the idea.”

Nevertheless, Hoemann suggested there’s something here that merits serious investigation, because having a specific word for something does help us identify it. “It might seem like a small individual act to learn new words. But if there are many individuals doing it, there’s a snowball effect and it actually becomes part of our culture.”

In the meantime, people are still suggesting more words for Lomas’s online lexicon. He’s noticing trends in the types of well-being they tend to harp on — groupings that he thinks may reveal something about what human beings find most vital these days. When I asked him what theme is coming through strongest, he replied immediately: our relationship to nature.

The word dadirri, used in several Australian Aboriginal languages, describes a respectful deep listening to the natural world, a receptive state that can be healing. Lomas quotes Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann of the Ngangikurungkurr tribe, who explains, “When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness.”

Although I was under no illusion that I’d be able to experience dadirri as Ungunmerr-Baumann does, I thought I might try to explore it in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, where I spent a few days in October.

One morning, I woke up before dawn and went outside. I purposely brought no phone, no people, no distractions. As the sun rose, I sat on a rock and tried to listen. At first I heard only the loud birds who seemed to be in charge of screaming the world’s pain: Ow! Ow! Ow! Owwwwwww! Ow!

Slowly I began to hear subtler sounds. The water lapping at the land. The occasional swish of a fish breaking the surface and flumping back into the bay.

Each time I heard that flump, I swiveled around trying to see the fish that had produced it — until I realized that by the time you can turn your head, you’ll already have missed it. Better to keep your eyes focused on one patch of water, watching and listening.

Sure enough, several minutes later I was rewarded for my attention by the sight of a great dark fish rising above the surface.

I felt a quiet elation — and then gratitude toward the word dadirri for getting me to put myself in the way of this happiness. It’s not that I’d never experienced anything like it before, but having a word for it made me more purposeful about cultivating it and also helped me notice it as it was happening.

I found myself curious about the elation I felt. What is it that makes nature so restorative? I thought it must have to do with the way that, when we’re outdoors, we can more easily sense the interconnectedness of everything. We remember that we’re part of a vast and complex ecosystem, which has gone on long before us and will go on long after us. Knowing this helps to repair the breach we feel in times of loneliness and alienation between us and other beings. It offers the comfort of continuity, the conviction that even if we feel cut off, we’re not really — it’s only that our language has failed us.

After entertaining these wispy thoughts, I looked down to find that a spider had been busy literalizing my metaphor. She’d spun her silky strands across my limbs, making me an actual part of her web.

I laughed, thinking of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The happiness that alighted upon me then wasn’t a butterfly, but it was pretty damn close.

Sigal Samuel is a staff writer for Vox’s Future Perfect. She writes about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and the intersection of technology and religion. She previously wrote about anxiety apps for The Highlight.

Jordan Kay is an illustrator and animation dabbler based in Seattle, Washington.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/37pr3MW

[gracieyvonnehunter]

American happiness is plummeting. Could a few words change that?

A psychologist claims that learning “untranslatable words” from other cultures may be a key to being happy. I experimented on myself to see whether it’s true.

“Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

Screw that.

The saying, sometimes attributed to the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, cautions us to not pursue happiness aggressively; we’ve got to just let it come to us. But for many of us today, such 19th century romantic musings seem quaint, if not downright un-American.

The pursuit of happiness inscribed into the Declaration of Independence has grown into a national obsession. We compulsively compare ourselves to others, asking whether they’re happier than we are and why, and then we buy — a yoga studio membership, an empowerment seminar, an $80 Goop water bottle with a built-in rose quartz crystal — to stop losing the competition.

I admit that I, too, zealously hunt down happiness these days. I’ve had a rough couple of years. My dad had a heart attack. My apartment was burglarized. My knees were gripped by chronic pain so intense that, for a while, I could barely walk.

So when I stumbled across the work of Tim Lomas, I pounced on his books, butterfly net in hand. A lecturer at the University of East London, Lomas specializes in a field known as positive psychology, the study of what makes human beings happy. Not just happy in the narrow sense, like the fleeting joy you get from ice cream, but in the broader sense of human flourishing — what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia. Positive psychologists research which factors are the biggest contributors to well-being, from income level to relationships to religiosity.

Lomas has recently published a trio of works on the connection between well-being and language: The Happiness Dictionary, Translating Happiness, and Happiness Found in Translation, his illustrated chapbook published this fall. In them, he says most of us in the West aren’t as happy as we could be, in part because we have a limited definition of happiness. Other cultures have concepts of well-being that are vastly different from ours, but because they’re expressed in languages we don’t understand, Lomas argues, we’re missing out on the insights they embody.

So in 2015, Lomas started the Positive Lexicography Project, a crowdsourced treasury of global terms of well-being, everything from fjaka (Croatian for “the sweetness of doing nothing”) to ubuntu (Zulu for “a spirit of universal kindness and common humanity: I am because you are”).

With the help of far-flung strangers on the internet, he’s since mined 140 languages to come up with a whopping 1,200 words. Each has its own unique shades of meaning not fully captured in English translation. He argues that engaging with these “untranslatable” terms can help us imagine, and ultimately experience, more types of well-being.

And a sense of well-being seems to be in short supply in the US. Americans are only becoming more miserable, according to the World Happiness Report. In 2019, the US dropped in the rankings for the third year in a row, coming in 19th place. Experts blame the decline on various factors, including the deadliest drug overdose crisis in our history, ever-higher levels of anxiety in annual surveys, and decreased trust in politicians and other public figures.

Against this backdrop, it’s easy to understand why the emerging field of positive psychology has grown popular both in academia and among the public. And given that the American hunt for happiness is turning out to be pretty unsuccessful, it’s not surprising that proposals such as Lomas’s — which suggest turning to other cultures for insight — exert a seductive pull.

When I called Lomas at his home in London, he told me one of his favorite words is wabi sabi, which is Japanese for “imperfect, weathered, rustic beauty.” The term puts him in a different frame of mind, letting him see things with new eyes.

“Right now I’m looking out at my garden,” he said. “There’s some broken pots there. So I’m thinking, is there a way to look at these pots in such a way that, even though they’re imperfect and old, I see there really is a beauty to them?”

Words like these are tantalizing because they’re so much more than just single words — they’re lexical powerhouses that seem to contain entire worldviews. They let us see how other cultures parse their experiences, offering us more options for how we might understand and live ours.

“In positive psychology, interventions might involve recalling a positive experience and writing about it for 20 minutes, or just sitting and meditating on it,” Lomas said. “With wabi sabi, you could send people away for 24 hours and say, ‘Try and notice this wherever possible and keep a diary on those experiences.’”

Psychologists have adopted a term for the ability to distinguish between feelings in an extra-nuanced way: They call it “emotional granularity.” For example, English has words like pleasure, satisfaction, and pride, but they don’t allow you to differentiate between the pride you feel for a friend whose accomplishment you’re also a tad jealous of, and the pride you feel for a friend whom you’re genuinely, 100 percent happy for. Yet Hebrew has a word for the latter — firgun — which describes total ungrudging and overt pride in another’s success. And German has a word for the opposite of firgun: schadenfreude.

Several studies suggest that increasing emotional granularity is good for our mental and physical health. It makes us more aware of our subjective experiences, which in turn makes it easier for us to regulate our emotions and maintain equanimity. It’s a souped-up version of what we do with preschoolers: We teach them to identify their feelings — “I’m mad” or “I’m sad” — which is the first step toward learning how to manage them.

Lomas says we should try doing the same thing as adults but with untranslatable words, so that we add ever more complexity to our emotional vocabularies. Writing in Translating Happiness, he says he’d want to see “a pilot study, followed by larger-scale empirical testing, randomized controlled trials, replication studies, and meta-analyses. These studies could use psychometric scales to assess the extent of improvement.”

Although I’m in no position to conduct a scientific study, I felt a certain frisson (that’s French for “a spine-tingling shiver of excitement”) when I read this. I wondered what would happen if I picked a few untranslatable words and tried to cultivate the types of well-being they embody.

I knew I had no hope of feeling my way into these words the same way they’d be experienced by someone who’s spent a lifetime steeped in the cultural tradition that gave rise to them. For me to try to access these words outside of their original context would inevitably be to impoverish and distort them. Still, I wondered if spending a little time trying to learn from them would make it possible to experience the world just a bit differently.

I began to plan my experiments.

As a teenager, I used to dance salsa and flamenco. But recently? Not so much. Over the past few years, a chronic pain in my knees that no doctor could explain or treat kept me from dancing. Which is to say, it kept me from the activity that helped get me out of my head and into my body, that replaced worry with sensation. Happily, this year the pain finally subsided, and so I figured it was time to give duende a shot.

Duende is Spanish for a heightened state of passionate emotion that you experience through art, especially dance. The poet Federico García Lorca said having duende is “not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins … it burns the blood like powdered glass, it exhausts, it rejects all the sweet geometry we understand.” And according to Lomas, “The term derives from a magical elf-like creature in Spanish mythology, which suggests the nonrational and otherworldly nature of the mental state duende signifies.”

One weekend, I saw online that a club near my house was hosting a Cuban dance party. The party didn’t start until 11 pm and my elder-millennial friends could not be corralled off their couches at such an ungodly hour. So I went alone, figuring I’d do fine.

Nope. Not fine at all. Everyone there was intimidatingly fantastic at salsa dancing! The men’s footwork was so fast that their shoes blurred into invisibility; the women were all hips, dresses describing sexy circles in the air as they spun. I stood with my back pasted to the wall and guzzled rum.

Eventually, I forced myself to find a partner and hit the dance floor. As he cut confidently through the air, I felt like a penguin in his arms, flightless and waddling pathetically. My confidence level did not rise over the next few hours. Each dancer was somehow better than the last, and I was way too self-conscious to feel the passionate, out-of-your-mind ecstasy of duende. It’s hard to feel mystically transported when you’re worried about stepping on some hot guy’s toes.

And although I hated to admit it, the quote attributed to Hawthorne did seem to be on-point: Trying to manufacture joy can make it even harder to access.

It was 2 am when, pasted to the wall again, guzzling water this time, I finally met someone as clueless as I was. I asked him how it was that everyone there was an amazing dancer. “Didn’t you know?” he asked. “These are professionals. Half of them own their own studios in the area.” I exploded into laughter. How did I pick the one club in town where everyone was a goddamn dance instructor?

Knowing that helped me loosen up. The guy and I danced together, laughing at ourselves. I started to actually have fun. We spun each other around. We tangoed across the floor. We jumped onto the sides of pillars and kicked off from them, flying, however briefly, through the air. It was not really duende, but it was a joy I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

The underlying premise of Lomas’s work is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — a theory, proposed by linguist Edward Sapir in 1929 and later developed by his student Benjamin Whorf — that our language shapes what we’re capable of thinking and feeling. The strong version of the hypothesis, linguistic determinism, holds that you can’t experience a feeling the same way if you don’t have a word for it. Linguists critiqued that view heavily in the 1960s and ’70s, and it remains unpopular these days.

But a milder one, linguistic relativity, is still embraced by some scholars, including Lomas. It holds that language influences experience but doesn’t determine it.

Even linguistic relativity is controversial, though. Some linguists, like John McWhorter, insist that “the world looks the same in any language” — and argue that claiming otherwise risks fetishizing some cultures (“Italians are a romantic people”) and demeaning others. I share some of that concern. As a woman of color whose family hails from India, Iraq, and Morocco, I’m always wary of ideas with the potential to Orientalize or exoticize. At the same time, I wanted to engage with Lomas’s ideas in good faith.

Words like these are lexical powerhouses

If you find it hard to believe that engaging with untranslatable words can actually increase your well-being, Lomas told me, consider sati. That’s a Pali word from India that you may have seen translated as mindfulness, though many meditators prefer to leave it untranslated, saying the English term is too cerebral to capture the emotional and ethical valences of the original. (Sati also has a very different unrelated meaning among some Indians and Nepalese.)

In the West, sati has been popularized by people like Jon Kabat-Zinn, a scientist who founded the Center for Mindfulness and who in the 1970s developed an eight-week course for people in clinical settings, which he called mindfulness-based stress reduction. Other American teachers, such as Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, have brought mindfulness practice sessions to the masses. Countless mindfulness apps have also embedded the concept firmly in our cultural lexicon. Lomas points to the rise of sati as evidence that Westerners can study an untranslatable phenomenon, create exercises for cultivating it, and through that measurably improve people’s well-being.

“People looked into sati and built a set of practices around it. That’s been so valuable,” Lomas told me. “Surely there are various other words you could explore in a similar way.”

But by and large, people haven’t yet done that. He’s currently collaborating with scholars in Spain and Japan to see if they can come up with exercises that will help people develop an experiential understanding of untranslatable terms.

Yet just as you need many, many hours of practice to develop mindfulness as a permanently altered trait rather than a temporarily altered state, cultivating different types of well-being will require more than a single exercise to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

It will also require that Westerners expand our notion of happiness. Some types of well-being, Lomas writes, don’t come in purely pleasurable packets — they’re ambivalent, containing both positive and negative valences. Think of the Italian word magari, which suggests a sense of “maybe, possibly,” the wistful hope of “if only.” Or the Amharic word tizita, which means “a bittersweet remembrance and longing for a time, person, or thing gone by.” Lomas writes:

Psychologists are increasingly appreciative of such feelings, as seen in an emergent body of work that my colleagues and I refer to as “second-wave” positive psychology. When positive psychology was initiated in the 1990s, it defined itself by focusing on positive emotions and qualities. Before long, however, scholars started to critique this foundational [Western] concept of the “positive.”

While [the value of ambivalent feelings] has been recognized within Western academia only relatively recently, many cultures have long since acknowledged their significance.

Lomas says Eastern cultures, in particular, have a wealth of richly ambivalent words.

Mono no aware is a Japanese term for appreciating the transiency of life and its beauty, or recognizing that some things are beautiful in part because they’re impermanent.

“The prevalence and importance of mono no aware in Japanese culture may be attributed in part to the influence of Zen, the branch of Buddhism that flowered in Japan from the 12th century onward,” Lomas writes. “Mono no aware is an aesthetic approach to the cognizance of impermanence, which is central to Buddhist teaching.”

Soon after I read this, I learned about a nearby Zen Buddhist silent meditation retreat. Its theme was liberation from the fear of impermanence. It was meant to cultivate “wordless awareness,” which meant no speaking, no phones, no music, and no books. The idea of being without words for a whole weekend freaked me out, but I signed up anyway.

Liberation from fear of impermanence was something I could really use. Ever since my dad had a heart attack three years ago, I’ve been imagining his death and worrying excessively about when it will happen — What if he goes into cardiac arrest while I’m on a trip overseas and I can’t get back to him in time? Maybe I shouldn’t go on overseas trips! — and how I’ll cope.

When I arrived at the retreat, 20 participants wearing sweatpants and kind smiles — mostly retirees grappling with the looming prospect of their own death — sat in a circle. The retreat leader said we’d be working through the “Touchings of the Earth,” a series of exercises designed by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk famed for his teachings on mindfulness. The leader told us he would read three phrases, and after each one, we’d prostrate ourselves on the ground, where we’d lie for five minutes in contemplation.

I felt a bit uncomfortable about the prostrating bit because that’s not really part of my cultural lexicon, but before I knew it, he was intoning the first phrase: “Touching the earth, I connect with ancestors and descendants of both my spiritual and my blood families.”

Down I went with everyone else. Pretty soon, I realized the benefits of lying flat-out on my belly. It humbled me. And it let me imagine myself as a straight line through time, my feet in the past, my hands stretching into the future. I found myself thinking of my Indian great-great-grandmother, an orphan who at age 13 was sent on a rickety train from Calcutta to Bombay to marry a man three times her age.

I thought of all the choices she made to shield her son from violence and poverty, and how they filtered down through the generations, eventually conditioning the choices my dad made for me. All these choices were still shaping my life in palpable ways: my geography, my class, my psychological makeup. I was just starting to think about how my own choices will shape the lives of my potential future children when a bell rang and everyone stood up.

“Touching the earth, I connect with all people and all species which are alive at this moment in this world with me.”

This time I thought of climate change. I pictured all the species we’re losing, trying to visualize each bird, each bee. Now I was a horizontal line, connecting outward to other beings in the present, feeling how precarious they are. The bell rang; everyone stood.

“Touching the earth, I let go of my idea that I am this body and my lifespan is limited.”

Maybe because I’d just imagined myself as an infinite line, stretching out first vertically, then horizontally, it was surprisingly easy to let go of my notion of self as a bounded thing. If my great-great-grandmother’s choices were shaping the lives of my potential future children and my action or nonaction was shaping the lives of birds millions of miles away, what sense did it make to consider myself a separate individual?

As we repeated this exercise over the three-day retreat, I felt open and raw, a crustacean without her shell: soft everywhere. I realized I’d been scared of the prospect of my dad dying in part because I’m scared that his individual mind will no longer be able to speak to me, comfort me, or advise me with any real particularity. I’d hated the notion of his him-ness evanescing into some anonymous flow of consciousness, a drop of water that loses its identity in the ocean.

By the end of the retreat, I didn’t come to completely embrace that notion or magically lose all my fear. What I felt was subtler; I simply feared and hated a little less. Maybe it wasn’t so bad for our particular identities to be transient, if we continue to communicate with everyone and everything through the choices we’ve made. Maybe, as mono no aware suggests, there was even a bit of loveliness to it.

Even as happiness in the US has been decreasing, countries around the world have become more committed to studying, tracking, and increasing their citizens’ well-being.

Amid the global financial crisis, national happiness became the subject of policy conferences and college courses. France commissioned a study on it, which leading economists — Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi — completed in 2009. In 2011, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released its first well-being report on its member countries, and in 2012, the UN began releasing its annual World Happiness Report.

Several countries are now explicitly focused on boosting well-being. There’s Bhutan, which in 2008 enshrined “gross national happiness” in its Constitution. There’s the United Arab Emirates, which in 2016 appointed a minister of state for happiness. And there’s New Zealand, which earlier this year released the world’s first-ever “well-being budget.” To measure progress toward increased well-being and inform policy, the government there will use 61 indicators tracking everything from loneliness to water quality.

That’s important, because government decisions — and major social problems like racism — do a lot to condition and constrain the types of happiness citizens can access. Political and social change are crucial for increasing well-being; the onus can’t and shouldn’t fall squarely on the individual.

But the machinery of policy grinds slowly, and many individuals want to feel happier now. That’s where Lomas’s ideas may be useful.

Some types of well-being are ambivalent, containing both positive and negative valences

Of course, people looking to boost their happiness will find countless other recommendations out there. Many claims stemming from the $4 trillion “wellness” or “self-care” industry — that vaginal jade eggs can fix your hormone levels, say — are not evidence-based. But some other techniques are backed by research. For instance, Laurie Santos, a psychologist who teaches a Yale course on happiness (the university’s most popular class ever), has explained the efficacy of activities like gratitude journaling. Research has also shown that strong social relationships are crucial to well-being; anything we can do to reduce the toxic effects of loneliness is probably going to yield major dividends.

By comparison, how effective is Lomas’s language-learning intervention likely to be?

It’s an empirical question to which we don’t have an answer because it has barely been studied. (My own personal study, with a sample size of one, is nothing like a rigorous scientific trial.) It’s also a question that’s difficult to answer because Lomas’s proposal is actually many proposals. It involves cultivating a plethora of different positive experiences. Plus, you can cultivate them in different ways — and which way you choose matters.

“If Lomas’s intervention involves writing in a journal, that may overlap a lot with gratitude journaling,” said Katie Hoemann, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northeastern University who researches the interaction between language and emotion. “And if you’re doing the intervention in a social context, you’re probably getting social benefits, too.” The variables may be difficult to isolate.

Hoemann sounded a note of skepticism about the emotional granularity assumption underlying Lomas’s proposal. She noted that although studies have indeed shown a link between emotional granularity and better behavioral control in the face of negative feelings, the evidence that increasing granularity ups positive feelings is much thinner.

Janet Nicol, a professor of linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science at the University of Arizona, cast doubt on Lomas’s claim that learning untranslatable words may improve our well-being. “That kind of claim is just not supported by the evidence so far,” she said. “I think he’s overstating the effects.”

She imagined an experiment to test the hypothesis: Teach a bunch of people the Chinese principle of feng shui, have them rearrange the furniture in their homes accordingly, give them a well-being survey before and after, and measure the extent of improvement. “But in that case, is it the language that’s important or is it just the idea?” Nicol asked. “I don’t think they have to learn the foreign term feng shui in order to learn the idea.”

Nevertheless, Hoemann suggested there’s something here that merits serious investigation, because having a specific word for something does help us identify it. “It might seem like a small individual act to learn new words. But if there are many individuals doing it, there’s a snowball effect and it actually becomes part of our culture.”

In the meantime, people are still suggesting more words for Lomas’s online lexicon. He’s noticing trends in the types of well-being they tend to harp on — groupings that he thinks may reveal something about what human beings find most vital these days. When I asked him what theme is coming through strongest, he replied immediately: our relationship to nature.

The word dadirri, used in several Australian Aboriginal languages, describes a respectful deep listening to the natural world, a receptive state that can be healing. Lomas quotes Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann of the Ngangikurungkurr tribe, who explains, “When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness.”

Although I was under no illusion that I’d be able to experience dadirri as Ungunmerr-Baumann does, I thought I might try to explore it in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, where I spent a few days in October.

One morning, I woke up before dawn and went outside. I purposely brought no phone, no people, no distractions. As the sun rose, I sat on a rock and tried to listen. At first I heard only the loud birds who seemed to be in charge of screaming the world’s pain: Ow! Ow! Ow! Owwwwwww! Ow!

Slowly I began to hear subtler sounds. The water lapping at the land. The occasional swish of a fish breaking the surface and flumping back into the bay.

Each time I heard that flump, I swiveled around trying to see the fish that had produced it — until I realized that by the time you can turn your head, you’ll already have missed it. Better to keep your eyes focused on one patch of water, watching and listening.

Sure enough, several minutes later I was rewarded for my attention by the sight of a great dark fish rising above the surface.

I felt a quiet elation — and then gratitude toward the word dadirri for getting me to put myself in the way of this happiness. It’s not that I’d never experienced anything like it before, but having a word for it made me more purposeful about cultivating it and also helped me notice it as it was happening.

I found myself curious about the elation I felt. What is it that makes nature so restorative? I thought it must have to do with the way that, when we’re outdoors, we can more easily sense the interconnectedness of everything. We remember that we’re part of a vast and complex ecosystem, which has gone on long before us and will go on long after us. Knowing this helps to repair the breach we feel in times of loneliness and alienation between us and other beings. It offers the comfort of continuity, the conviction that even if we feel cut off, we’re not really — it’s only that our language has failed us.

After entertaining these wispy thoughts, I looked down to find that a spider had been busy literalizing my metaphor. She’d spun her silky strands across my limbs, making me an actual part of her web.

I laughed, thinking of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The happiness that alighted upon me then wasn’t a butterfly, but it was pretty damn close.

Sigal Samuel is a staff writer for Vox’s Future Perfect. She writes about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and the intersection of technology and religion. She previously wrote about anxiety apps for The Highlight.

Jordan Kay is an illustrator and animation dabbler based in Seattle, Washington.

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Past Lives: How to Tell If You’re an Old Soul

There’s no way to know for sure if death is the end. Is there simply nothing waiting for us or do we move on to another plane of existence? For many, the idea that we’ve been here before, that with every fully lived life we get to come back and start again, fresh in a new body without any of our memories, is a theory that holds plenty of weight. There’s even a word for the feeling that you’ve been here before: being an old soul.

But how can you tell whether you’re one of those old souls or not? There are a number of barely perceptible hints that can show you the way to unlock the secrets of who you may have been in one of those past lives.

Here are a few ways you can tell if you’ve lived more than once

Memories of Events that Never Happened, Places You’ve Never Been

Have you ever stepped into a strange room and been overwhelmed with the feeling of having been there before, even though you know you never have? Does some event trigger a memory that seems like you’re own but couldn’t possibly be? You’re experiencing déjà vu, something that could indicate that you’re remembering a snippet of a past life. While everyone might experience this sensation once in a while, those of us who have been here before might find that they experience déjà vu much more often.

Vivid Dreams That Occur Over and Over Again

Just about everyone dreams, even if they don’t always remember them. Lots of people lead vivid dream lives, and the brain uses dream time to process the events of the day, mull over problems, and any number of other things that we’re still just learning about. Yet when you have dreams that are especially vivid, and ones that occur over and over again throughout a long period of time, these can be telltale signs of having been here before. Hints that these could be past life memories include being dressed in period clothing, participating in historical events, and looking and/or feeling like someone different than who you are now.

An Attraction to Certain Time Periods or Cultures

Have you always been interested in Elizabethan England? Renaissance Italy? Ancient Greece? Do you not really know why you’re drawn to these cultures or time periods, especially if you don’t have any ancestral ties to these times and cultures? While sometimes this might be just an affinity, it could also be an indication that you might have been present in that culture during a time well before the present day. If you just feel “at home” wearing another culture’s dress, learning their language, enjoying their art, and other related things as if they were your own, though, chances are high you’re feeling vibrations from a past life.

Phobias, Fears, and Other Unexplained Emotions

It’s natural to not like spiders, or heights, or anything else that commonly makes people anxious. Irrational fears are uncommon but not rare. However, if you have a phobia or other apprehensions that don’t stem from something you experienced in this life, you might be feeling evidence of a fear you picked up from a last one, perhaps even because it might have been how you died. Scared of going swimming, for example, even though you’ve never experienced anything negative associated with the water? You might just have drowned in a former life, and the trauma was so deep that it’s bleeding over into this life.

Possessing Strong, Almost Supernatural, Levels of Intuition

Have you been good at picking right answers seemingly at “random”? Can you just get a feel for a situation, or peg someone’s personality, right off the bat without observing for very long? You’ve got a strong intuitive sense. Some people are just born that way, but it’s not necessarily random. Having that strong an intuition could be evidence that you’re relying on the wisdom of the lives you’ve already lived in the past, and that’s informing your decisions. These aren’t even memories you’re receiving — more like gut feelings. They’re just coming from an older, wiser version of you that you might not know about.

Being Uncannily Talented in a Language You Don’t Know

It’s one thing to have a knack for learning languages — lots of people are talented that way. Yet it’s quite another to have an instinctual, almost uncanny ability to read, speak, and understand a language you’ve never spent time studying. In many situations, this can be a real shock to you and the people around you, especially if this hidden skill manifests itself while you’re talking in your sleep or undergoing hypnosis. Without any other possible explanation, it’s a strong sign that you spoke that language in a past life, and that part of you still retains that knowledge to this very day.

Being Unnaturally Good at History Without Studying

There’s smart, and then there’s cheating. If you’ve never had to open a textbook to pass a history exam in your life, you might just have an incredibly good memory when it comes to your in-class lectures. The alternative, though, is that you’re preternaturally good at history class because you’ve got an affinity for just knowing things about people, places, and events that occurred well in the past because you were alive at the time and you’re tapping into the vast repository of your past life memories.

Unexplained Physical Symptoms

The human body is mysterious. Plenty of us have aches and pains that appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly, but persistent physical symptoms that you suffer from that don’t seem to have any traceable source could be an indication of an old wound or illness that you experienced in a past life. In many cases, if you look into your past life history and begin to discover who you might have been and what might have happened to you, your strange symptoms may lessen or even disappear upon figuring them out.

Strange and Mysterious Birthmarks

Much like how some people suffer from strange physical symptoms that might originate from trauma in past lives, some people born with noteworthy birthmarks might be able to use these birthmarks as indicators of things that happened to them in a past life. If you were bitten by a snake in your previous life, you might have a birthmark that looks suspiciously like a snakebite — and looking at that birthmark in such a way might help you trigger some past-life memories of the event.

Feeling Like You’re Older Than You Are

There’s a reason people call you an “old soul” sometimes. Whether you were an incredibly mature child, have wisdom beyond your years as a young adult, or simply have a knack for getting things right without being told what to do or how to do it, you could just be lucky — or you could be benefiting from a number of lifetimes that you’ve lived already and that you’re half-remembering. In the case of simply knowing what to do, you might not be remembering them at all but simply feeling them on an instinctual level.

Not Having a Particularly Strong Bond with Immediate Family

No family is perfect. Sometimes we just don’t get along with our parents or siblings, and there is any number of reasons why that may be. Yet in some instances, not having a particularly strong bond with your immediate family members, especially with your parents, may indicate that you’re closely connected with one of your past lives. If this is accompanied by feelings of closeness with other parents that you might not even know — such as strangers that you see in your dreams — you could very well be feeling the effects of a particularly strong bond between you and your parents from a former life.

Feeling Like You’re In the “Wrong” Body

There’s no rule when it comes to reincarnation that you’re going to end up in a body of the same gender every time. You’re just as likely to be a man in one life, a woman in the next, and then a man in yet another, and so on and so forth. In some instances, when you feel in your current life that you might have been born into a body that’s the opposite gender or is otherwise somehow “wrong”, this could be you remembering what it was like to live your life in your previous body.

Not Feeling Like Your Home is Truly “Home”

Sometimes, people who have a closer tie to their past lives than others might feel especially out of place in their current life. This can extend to feelings of not truly having a home of your very own, even if you’ve grown up in the same place with all your current family members. Some people even believe that we could have lived past lives on other planets or in other dimensions, which might make this feeling of not belonging anywhere even more intense. If you feel like you’ve never fit in, that nobody understands you, and that everything is just slightly off, this might be what’s troubling you.

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