Headline, January 06 2022/ ''' '' HAPPY STUDENTS HAUNT '' '''

''' '' HAPPY STUDENTS

 HAUNT '' '''

THOMAS HARDY : HAPPINESS WAS BUT THE OCCASIONAL EPISODE - in a general drama of total pain.

ON THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY : With Almighty God's blessings, we are going to make every day the best day of the year and set about accomplishing great things.

The planned punctuations to life - holidays, job promotions, family milestones - often disappoint. New Year's Eve is useless; Thanksgiving ends up being memorable not for the meal but for the next-day deliberations over how many ways you can eat a leftover turkey.

I rarely had any photos at all of the best days. I was too busy living them. The problem with these best days was they went by without me realizing how special they were.

Unmarked by ceremony and undocumented for posterity, they streamed together in my mind as a blur.

ON THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY : I WONDERED - COULD I FIND WAY TO KNOW WHEN THE best days were coming and really feel them as they happened? So I tried declaring a best day in advance.

Even if it felt ridiculous, this effort to make the ordinary feel extraordinary usually worked. Mundane experiences felt special when I marked them as such. Staying up talking in a living room until too late at night or going for a weekend run through a park in the sunshine felt as wonderful as I had hoped it would.

Designating a regular night as a best night helped me claim that moment. I no longer had to battle my nostalgia for ownership of my experiences. Now that I was looking for them, I caught them before they became memories.

Marking experiences this way is one key to happiness, said Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist, Zen priest and the director of the Harvard Happiness Study.

''Often we'll remember the things that are more emotionally loaded as opposed to the neutral, the flat, the borng,'' Dr. Waldinger told me.

''That's why you probably can't remember what you had for dinner last Monday night - unless it was something special. That's because our brains have to screen out a whole bunch of stuff. So when we look back, we tend to remember the things that were more emotional.''

In other words, the framing I was giving my declared best days - and the anticipation I was assigning them - was tricking my brain into seeing them as something more special, more weighted with emotional significance,than it otherwise would. I was burning these ordinary but precious days into my mind.

LOOKING BACK at 2021, I realized recently that I had stopped seeing the best days. I was too busy following the news and wishing my life would go back to normal. But this is normal now. Our lives are not on hold. This is it.

It's easy to stay caught in nostalgia's thrall, to think back longingly to when things were better. That makes sense because nostalgia is an especially powerful psychological tool for enduring trauma. It helps you cope with stress, combat loneliness and find meaning in struggle. It is restorative.

But for me, it has sometimes led to an unsettling feeling that my past was better than where I am now.

When I think about it's clear that there will be experiences from this pandemic that I will miss or feel nostalgic for as well : a blissfully vacant calendar; meandering walking catchups with friends; smiling at neighbors after months of waving from across the street. Not the tedium or the dread, of course, but the beauty we found in the quiet.

And lately, I've realized that a lot of what made me unhappy during the pandemic made me unhappy before hand, too. The loneliness that I worried at times might become a permanent feature of adulthood, for example, or the way the days and years can stretch together.

The excuses I made as I waited for something to change.

We can't wait anymore.The stress we feel now isn't going to magically disappear, just as it never would have before the pandemic. The world has always been a shambles. There's only one thing we can control : How are we going to live in it?

Why not try to have a best day right now, maybe even tonight? It certainly beats waiting until the world is fixed. And a moment of happiness doesn't stop us from pushing for the worst of the world to change. On the contrary, as Dr. Waldinger told me, savoring positive moments can serve as fuel to create more of them.

So I'm going to go back to my practice of declaring a best day in advance. I'll start by declaring today or tomorrow or next Monday one of the best days of 2021. Then I'll tell someone its new designation, because a best day is often better with company. I'll put my phone down. I'll decide to do something I enjoy - it could be as simple as having some friends over or going for a walk.

Most important, I won't wait. Today is as good a day as any to enjoy what life already offers. Welcome !WOW! - The World Students Society - for every subject in the world.

The Honor and Serving of Great Operational Research on Happiness and great writings in Philosophy, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Lindsay Grouse, an editor and producer who writes on gender, ambition and power.

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! -  The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless