The Art of Happiness (14 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Several days later I was still in Delhi on a two-day stopover before returning home. The change from the tranquillity of Dharamsala was jarring, and I was in a foul mood. Besides bat tling the stifling heat, the pollution, and the crowds, the side-walks swarmed with a common species of urban predator dedicated to the Street Swindle. Walking the scorching Delhi streets, a Westerner, a Foreigner, a Target, approached by a half-dozen hustlers per block, it felt as if I had “CHUMP” tattooed on my forehead. It was demoralizing.

That morning, I fell for a common two-man street scam. One partner splattered a splotch of red paint on my shoes while I wasn't looking. Down the block, his confederate, an innocent looking shoeshine boy, brought the paint to my attention and offered to shine my shoes at the usual going rate. He deftly shined the shoes within minutes. When finished, he calmly demanded a huge sum—two months wages for many in Delhi. When I balked, he claimed that that was the price he had quoted me. I objected again, and the boy began to bellow, drawing a crowd, crying that I was refusing to pay him for services already rendered. Later that day I learned that this was a common scam played on unsuspecting tourists
_;
after demanding a huge sum, the shoeshine boy deliberately raises a fuss, drawing a crowd, with the intention of extorting the money from the tourist by embarrassment and the desire to avoid a scene.

That afternoon I lunched with a colleague at my hotel. The events of the morning were quickly forgotten as she inquired about my recent series of interviews with the Dalai Lama. We became engrossed in a discussion about the Dalai Lama's ideas regarding empathy and the importance of taking the other person's perspective. After lunch we jumped into a cab and set off to visit some mutual friends. As the cab pulled away, my thoughts returned to the shoeshine scam that morning, and as dark images rustled in my mind, I happened to glance at the meter.

“Stop the taxi!” I yelled. My friend jumped at the sudden outburst. The taxi driver scowled at me in the rearview mirror but kept driving.

“Pull over!” I demanded, my voice now quivering with a trace of hysteria. My friend appeared shocked. The taxi stopped. I pointed at the meter, furiously stabbing at the air. “You didn't reset the meter! There was over twenty rupees on the meter when we started!”

“So sorry, sir,” he said with a dull indifference that further infuriated me, “I forgot to reset.... I will restart ...”

“You're not restarting anything!” I exploded. “I'm fed up with you people trying to pad fares, drive around in circles, or do whatever you can to rip people off ... I'm just ... just ... fed up!” I sputtered and fumed with a sanctimonious intensity. My friend looked embarrassed. The taxi driver merely stared at me with the same defiant expression found most often among the sacred cows that strolled out into the middle of a busy Delhi street and stopped, with the seditious intent to hold up traffic. He looked at me as if my outburst was merely tiresome and boring. I threw a few rupees into the front seat, and without further comment opened the car door for my friend and followed her out.

Within a few minutes we hailed another taxi and were on our way again. But I couldn't let it drop. As we drove through the streets of Delhi, I continued to complain about how “everyone” in Delhi was out to cheat tourists and that we were nothing but quarry. My colleague listened silently as I ranted and raved. Finally she said, “Well, twenty rupees is only around a quarter. Why get so worked up?”

I seethed with pious indignation. “But it's the principle that counts!” I proclaimed. “I can't see how you can be so calm about this whole thing anyway when it happens all the time. Doesn't it bother you?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “it did for a minute, but I started thinking about what we were talking about at lunch, about the Dalai Lama saying how important it is to see things from another's perspective. While youwere getting worked up, I tried to think about what I might have in common with the cabdriver. We both want good food to eat, to sleep well, to feel good, to be loved, and so on. Then, I tried to imagine myself as the cabdriver. I sit in a stifling cab all day without air conditioning, maybe I'm angry and jealous of rich foreigners.... and the best way I can come up with to try to make things ‘fair,' to be happy, is to derive ways to cheat people out of their money. But the thing is, even when it works and I squeeze a few extra rupees out of an unsuspecting tourist, I can't imagine that it's a very satisfying way to be happier or a very satisfying life.... Anyway, the more I imagined myself as the cabdriver, somehow the less angry I was at him. His life just seemed sad.... I mean, I still don't agree with what he did and we were right to get out of the cab, but I just couldn't get worked up enough to hate him for it....”

I was silent. Startled, in fact, at how little I had actually absorbed from the Dalai Lama. By that time I was beginning to develop an appreciation of the practical value of his advice, such as “understanding another's background,” and of course I found his examples of how he implemented these principles in his own life to be inspiring. But as I thought back over our series of discussions, beginning in Arizona and now continuing in India, I realized that right from the beginning our interviews had taken on a clinical tone, as if I were asking him about human anatomy, only in this case, it was the anatomy of the human mind and spirit. Until that moment, however, somehow it hadn't occurred to me to apply his ideas fully to my own life, at least not right now—I always had a vague intention of trying to implement his ideas in my life at some point in the future, perhaps when I had more time.

My conversations with the Dalai Lama in Arizona had begun with a discussion about the sources of happiness. And despite the fact that he has chosen to live his life as a monk, studies have shown that marriage is a factor that can, in fact, bring happiness—providing the intimacy and close bonds that enhance health and overall life satisfaction. There have been many thousands of surveys of Americans and Europeans that show that generally, married people are happier and more satisfied with life than single or widowed people—or especially compared to divorced or separated people. One survey found that six in ten Americans who rate their marriage as “very happy” also rate their life as a whole as “very happy.” In discussing the topic of human relationships, I thought it important to bring up the subject of that common source of happiness.

Minutes before one scheduled interview with the Dalai Lama, I sat with a friend on an outdoor patio at the hotel in Tucson enjoying a cool drink. Mentioning the topics of romance and marriage which I was intending to bring up in my interview, my friend and I soon began commiserating about being single. As we talked, a healthy-looking young couple, golfers maybe, happily vacationing on the cusp of the tourist season, sat down at a table near us. They had the look of a midrange marriage—no longer honeymooners perhaps, but still young and no doubt in love. It must be nice, I thought.

No sooner had they sat down, than they began to bicker.

“... I told you we'd be late!” the woman accused acidly, her voice surprisingly husky, the rasp of vocal cords pickled by years of cigarette smoke and alcohol. “Now we barely have enough time to eat. I can't even enjoy my food!”

“... if you didn't take so long to get ready ...” the man shot back automatically, in quieter tones, but every syllable laden with annoyance and hostility.

Rebuttal. “I was ready a half-hour ago. You're the one who had to finish reading the paper ...”

And on it went. It didn't stop. Like the Greek dramatist Euripides said, “Marry, and it may go well. But when a marriage fails, then those who marry live at home in hell.”

The argument, rapidly escalating, put a quick end to our lamentations about the single life. My friend merely rolled his eyes and, quoting a line from
Seinfeld,
said, “Oh yeah! I want to get married real soon!”

 

 

 

Only moments before, I had every intention of starting our session by soliciting the Dalai Lama's opinion about the joys and virtues of romance and marriage. Instead, I entered his hotel suite and almost before sitting down, asked, “Why do you suppose that conflicts seem to arise so often in marriages?”

“When dealing with conflicts, of course it can be quite complex,” the Dalai Lama explained. “There can be many factors involved.
So, when we are dealing with trying to understand relationship problems, the first stage in this process involves deliberately reflecting on the underlying nature and basis of that relationship.

“So, first of all, one has to recognize that there are different types of relationships and understand the differences between them. For example, leaving aside the issue of marriage for a moment, even within ordinary friendships we can recognize that there are different types of friendships. Some friendships are based on wealth, power, or position. In these cases your friendship continues as long as your power, wealth, or position is sustained. Once these grounds are no longer there, then the friendship will also begin to disappear. On the other hand, there is another kind of friendship. Friendships that are based not on considerations of wealth, power, and position but rather on true human feeling, a feeling of closeness in which there is a sense of sharing and connectedness. This type of friendship is what I would call genuine friendship because it would not be affected by the status of the individual's wealth, position, or power, whether it is increasing or whether it is declining. The factor that sustains a genuine friendship is a feeling of affection. If you lack that, then you won't be able to sustain a genuine friendship. Of course, we have mentioned this before and all this is very obvious, but if you're running into relationship problems, it's often very helpful to simply stand back and reflect on the basis of that relationship.

“In the same way, if someone is running into problems with his or her spouse, it can be helpful to look at the underlying basis of the relationship. For example, you often find relationships very much based on immediate sexual attraction. When a couple has just met, seen each other on just a few occasions, they may be madly in love and very happy,” he laughed, “but any decision about marriage made at that instant would be very shaky. Just as one can become, in some sense, insane from the power of intense anger or hatred, it is also possible for an individual to become in some sense insane by the power of passion or lust. And sometimes you might even find situations where an individual could feel, ‘Oh, my boyfriend or girlfriend is not really a good person, not a kind person, but still I feel attracted to him or her.' So a relationship that is based on that initial attraction is very unreliable, very unstable, because it is very much based on temporary phenomena. That feeling is very short lived, so after some time, that will go.” He snapped his fingers. “So it shouldn't be much of a surprise if that kind of relationship runs into trouble, and a marriage based on that will eventually run into trouble ... But what do you think?”

“Yes, I'd have to agree with you on that,” I answered. “It seems that in any relationship, even the most ardent ones, the initial passion eventually cools down. Some research has shown that those who regard the initial passion and romance as essential to their relationship may end up disillusioned or divorced. One social psychologist, Ellen Berscheid, at the University of Minnesota I think, looked at that issue and concluded that the failure to appreciate the limited half-life of passionate love can doom a relationship. She and her colleagues felt that the increase in divorce rates over the past twenty years is partly linked to the increased importance people place on intense positive emotional experiences in their lives—experiences like romantic love. But one problem is that those types of experiences may be particularly difficult to sustain over time ...”

“This seems very true,” he said. “So, when dealing with relationship problems you can see the tremendous importance of examining and understanding the underlying nature of the relationship.

“Now, while some relationships are based on immediate sexual attraction, you can have other types of relationships, on the other hand, in which the person in a cool state of mind will realize that physically speaking, in terms of appearance, my boyfriend or girlfriend may not be that attractive but he or she is really a good person, a kind, gentle person. A relationship that is built on that forms a kind of a bond that is more long lasting, because there is a kind of genuine communication at a very human and personal level between the two ...”

The Dalai Lama paused for a moment as if mulling the issue over, then added, “Of course, I should make it clear that one can have a good, healthy relationship that includes sexual attraction as one component. So it seems, then, that there can be two principal types of relationships based on sexual attraction. One type is based on pure sexual desire. In this case the motive or the impetus behind the bond really is just temporary satisfaction, immediate gratification. In that type of relationship, individuals are relating to each other not so much as people but rather as objects. That type of relationship is not very sound. If the relationship is based only on sexual desire, without a component of mutual respect, then the relationship becomes almost like prostitution, in which neither side has respect for the other. A relationship built primarily on sexual desire is like a house built on a foundation of ice
_;
as soon as the ice melts, the building collapses.

“However, there is a second type of relationship which is also based on sexual attraction, but in which the physical attraction is not the predominant basis of the relationship. In this second type of relationship there is an underlying appreciation of the value of the other person based on your feeling that the other person is kind, nice, and gentle, and you accord respect and dignity to that other individual. Any relationship that is based on that will be much more long lasting and reliable. It's more appropriate. And in order to establish that type of relationship, it is crucial to spend enough time to get to know each other in a genuine sense, to know each other's basic characteristics.