For a long time I’ve been struck by how the word “smart” and any of its many synonyms is considered such a revered accolade. What can you call someone other than maybe saint that connotes a quality as desirable? Yet, I find so widely true Thoreau’s observation: the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Regardless of horsepower, education, skill and worldly acclaim, so many of us struggle, often unsuccessfully, to satisfy that aspiration most commonly held throughout humankind. The one that leads me to define smartness this way: the ability to use what we know, and what we have access to, to make ourselves happy.
Am I smart on these terms? I think I am. But I wasn’t born that way. And I didn’t get that way until about the day before yesterday. And I won’t stay that way without constant vigilance about where I place my attention. How I train my mind. Or so it seems as I make my way through year 75.
When I first strolled onto the Amherst campus at 27, the oldest freshman the College had ever admitted, and surely the first to have graduated next-to-last in his high school class, I asked myself, “What do these people know that I don’t?” I was speaking of the faculty primarily. “Are they happier? Do they have better relationships with their kids, or their sweethearts? Do they have a deeper sense of God or the ultimate nature of things?”
It didn’t take me long to learn that the answer was no. Or better, not necessarily. Yes, some might. But not as a group. Group-wise, what every one of them knew that I didn’t was a profound intellectual understanding of something. Plus the analytical and communication skills that allowed them to function in an elite academic setting, teaching some of the world’s brightest students, me notwithstanding.
The first class reunion I attended was my 30th. I in my early 60s, my classmates a decade younger. Virtually all of us were the recipients of the world’s good will. To be sure, the tenor of the event was largely celebratory. Lots of gratitude for our lives and being part of this rare community. At the same time, the collective conviviality included, I sensed, a thread of despair. It is the despair that comes from not being sure what to do next when you realize that a lifetime of performing at a high level on society’s terms––doing everything that has been asked––does not, in itself, equal happiness.
I mention my college mates simply because they are so capable. Laudable, really, considering their knowledge, talents, and achievements. But this phenomenon of linking our happiness to worldly outcomes is not unique to any particular group of people. It seems to live at the root of quiet desperation among Thoreau’s mass of men.
Freeing that desperation, for me, began only after accepting that how I defined my world was the culprit. Only I can make me happy, or otherwise.
A recent book I find inspiring is “The Book of Joy,” about a series of conversations between those dear friends the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The proposition that we can be happy in the face of anything can seem beyond what we know––until we take advantage of our access to those smart souls, like these two cats, who have dedicated their lives to it.