I wasn’t surprised to find out that the idea of “the happiest man in the world” hadn’t originated with Patty Gras. As near as I’ve been able to determine so far, that phrase originated in an article by Anthony Barnes in the January 21, 2007, issue of The Independent. The article talks about Matthieu Ricard, a French academic who left his job to become a Buddhist monk. Ricard was one of the subjects of some research done by Dr. Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dr. Davidson’s team of researchers found that MRI scans of monks who’ve done a lot of meditation show indications of a higher level of “positive emotions” in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain—associated with happiness—than college students in the control group.

I took a look at the paper that the researchers published in 2004 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice.” It doesn’t contain the words happy, happiness, or happiest. I don’t have the expertise to understand all of the researchers’ conclusions, but I can say for sure that they don’t include the assertion that Matthieu Ricard is the happiest man in the world or, indeed, that Buddhist monks are habitually happy. It does seem to conclude that long-term meditators can induce mental states in themselves that are related in some way to positive emotions. This is interesting and thought-provoking scientific data that doesn’t need to be sensationalized by labeling anyone with the absurd title of “the most joyful person on the planet.”

But I’m glad that Patty Gras sent me that silly promo, because otherwise, I might not have looked into the UWM research or learned that Matthieu Ricard presented a talk at the TED Conference entitled “Habits of Happiness.” I’m looking forward to watching the video podcast. (I’m disappointed with the folks at TED for propagating the “happiest man in the world” label, though.)

I’m interested in the possible connection between meditation and positive emotions. I’d heard of this research, and I’ve been curious about where it might lead, but I’d never seen any presentation of the actual data until now. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d like to find a place where I can study or practice meditation with guidance from someone who teaches it from a scientific perspective, not a mystical one. If it hadn’t been for Patty’s careless e-mail—and my critical reaction to it—I might not have found these interesting new data points for my own research into so-called “enlightenment.”

Thanks, Patty! Keep the woowoo coming!

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

But you asked me to make three wishes, so here goes.

Number one, I wish I could forget the wrongs that I never had an opportunity to make right. There aren’t many of them. When you live as long as I have, you develop a sense of when to remain silent; you spend a lot of time in silence. And you get a lot of chances to apologize, to offer repayment, to make things right. A funny thing—even though you have a lot more time to hold a grudge, you feel less and less inclined to do so. But there is an apology I never had a chance to offer, one forgiveness for which I never had the opportunity to ask, and I wish it weren’t so often on my mind.

Would I call this emotion regret? Not exactly. The sensation is more like the hunger you sometimes feel early in the morning, when it’s still too early to get out of bed. You ignore it, you go back to sleep, and it’s gone when you awaken again.

Two: I wish that I could share my contentment more generously with people who haven’t learned to be deeply happy yet. I understand the operation of happiness, the biochemical reactions, the hormonal responses, and the subtle connections from mind to mind and body to body. I know that joy can be shared, that it can be taught, but only to the extent that the student is prepared to receive the lesson. Each of us is a vessel for happiness, but a small vessel cannot be made large overnight, and I cannot pour my abundance into a heart that already bears as much as it can hold. I have learned a lot of things, but never to accept this cruel limitation on our existence.

When I was young—really young: 30, 35, 40 years old—I used to say, “I wish I had known when I was 18 what I know now.” And then came the quantum leaps of progress that are responsible for my longevity, and suddenly, it was possible to have the strength and vitality of youth along with what we used to call the wisdom of age. And those of us who took the treatment could experience “knowing then what we know now.” We could savor our second youth, taking the chances we’d passed up the first time, making sure that youth wasn’t wasted on the young yet again.

My second young adulthood was a lot of fun, and it went on for a couple of hundred years. It was followed by my second coming of age, which was more satisfying than the first, more real in every way. I have never questioned that knowledge and understanding are always and everywhere to be sought, savored, cherished, and retained. There are new dimensions that we cannot explore until we are fully present in the one that comes before.

And yet, I wonder sometimes if life might somehow be circular in shape, and if there might come a time when I approach the ignorance, the innocence of youth as a new frontier to be crossed, a dimension beyond some final, absolute presence. So my third wish is that some day, if I live long enough, I might come to not know then what I know now.

When I was in eighth or ninth grade, I taught my parents some rudimentary Spanish. At the time, Dad was working for University of Houston, which was a member of CAMESA, a pan-American research consortium that held most of its meetings in Guadalajara. Mom went with him on several of the trips. My mother had studied French in school and had a pretty good ear for the sound of Spanish; my father had studied German but was a fairly hopeless case. (Sorry, Dad!)

They bought a set of cassette tapes of Spanish lessons. A few evenings a week after dinner, we’d listen to the tapes, and I’d supplement the training by explaining lessons in greater detail, writing out words, drawing diagrams of verb forms, and so forth. It was a source of pride that I had something that I could teach my parents!

When I was in ninth grade, I had just arrived in Spanish class one morning when a student from a lower-level class came into the room to tell our teacher, Mrs. Johnson, that the other teacher hadn’t arrived, and neither had a substitute. I’m not sure what the student expected her to do, but Mrs. J. took decisive action: she sent me and another student from our class across the hall to teach the class. I don’t remember much about the experience, but I can’t imagine that a couple of ninth-graders could have taught Spanish very effectively to a room full of eight-graders.

After I graduated from college, most of my language learning went into cold storage. Living in Tennessee and Texas and working in overwhelmingly English-speaking settings, I rarely got a chance to flex my language muscles. But all of that language study added a lot to my understanding of the roots and nuances of meaning of English words, so I never felt that the time had been wasted.

I always theorized that with my facility for learning languages and my years of study, if I were ever immersed in a Spanish- or French-speaking environment, I could become conversant in a month or two. The only opportunities to experiment came on the occasions when I dated guys who spoke very little English. My Spanish would help to fill in some of the gaps in our conversations when their English wasn’t sufficient. But then I met Mark, a Mexican-American who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. My skills didn’t improve much during the eight years we were together.

Then last November, I got the chance to test my theory in an unlikely place: Italy. I was five days into a two-week vacation in Rome when I met Augusto, an Ecuadorian who’s lived in Rome for the last seven years. He speaks Spanish and Italian, but barely any English—only a few random words that he’s picked up from American movies.

We chatted online several times before we met in person. I was able to scrape together enough Spanish to get through the standard getting-to-know-you conversations: What is your name? Where are you from? What do you do for a living? How old are you? What do you do for fun? When we decided to meet for dinner, I warned him that my spoken Spanish wasn’t anywhere near as good as my written command of the language. I don’t think he believed me, but I proved it to him by becoming completely inarticulate the moment we met. (In my defense, I can only say that I was overwhelmed by the excitement of the situation: meeting a strange man at an unfamiliar Metro stop and being whisked away into the night on his motor scooter…but that’s a story for another time.)

In Italy, I frequently ask people if they speak English, and they say, “Just a little,” and then I discover that they speak English a hundred times better than I speak Italian. But it quickly became clear that Augusto really doesn’t speak much English. So after my initial nervousness wore off, I accepted the fact that we were going to have to get by with my Spanish. I dug around in my memory for the most useful phrase in any encounter at a language barrier: ¿Cómo se dice en español ____? (How does one say ____ in Spanish?) Another helpful phrase: Más despacio, por favor. (Slower, please.)

Augusto and I hit it off despite the language barrier, and we ended up spending most of the remaining 10 days of my trip together whenever he wasn’t working or playing soccer. Immersion in his Spanish- and Italian-speaking world was the perfect laboratory for refreshing my skills. We were surrounded by objects I could point at to renew and expand my vocabulary: How do you say artichoke in Spanish? How do you say towel? How do you say socks? And I was amazed to find that as the days went by, I grasped more and more of what he was saying from the environmental context—where we were and what we were doing—, from his physical gestures, his facial expressions, his tone, and from the ever-expanding context of our shared experience.

It’s hard to fathom or explain the cognitive mechanism behind that last element. But I found that as I got to know him, I often just knew what he was saying to me in spite of not knowing all of the words he was using. Then I would ask him to explain a specific word or phrase, and he would rephrase it—or sometimes just repeat it more slowly and emphatically—and my seemingly intuitive understanding would give way to another morsel of certainty.

I came back from that vacation with the conviction that it was time to take my love of languages out of mothballs for good. I went to the iTunes store and subscribed to several Spanish language-study podcasts. I particularly like Notes in Spanish, which offers free conversation podcasts that help you learn new vocabulary and grammar from context, supported by handouts that you can download for a modest fee. I bought a Berlitz CD boxed set for learning Italian, which included a bunch of vocabulary exercises to load on the iPod as well as lessons to take on the computer. Mark and I enrolled in a five-week Italian I course at University of Houston Continuing Education.

UH CE is a major client of our graphic-design business, Starfall Graphics, and their accelerated language study program is a mainstay of their business. I asked the director of the AL program to evaluate my Spanish skills. She interviewed me in Spanish for about 10 minutes and then told me that I was ready for Level 5. (What a delightful surprise! I had been thinking that maybe I could manage Level 3.) For the next two weekends, I’ll be taking an intensive Spanish V course.

Oh, and I’ve started reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits in the original Spanish. I also asked for help from my friend Joe, a Panamanian who’s lived in the U.S. for many years. He’s agreed to help me practice my Spanish occasionally when we go for walks together at Memorial Park. He’s fluent in English, so I can ask him to clarify in English when the Spanish gets to be over my head.

I don’t know where all of this language study is headed in terms of academic goals or career direction. I’d like to sharpen my skills enough to be able to travel in Spanish-speaking countries (and Italy) with confidence and ease, but I don’t know exactly what I’ll be traveling there to do. I don’t think that uncertainty matters, though. Learning languages is a sufficient end in itself. Understanding a person’s language is a key to understanding that person’s way of looking at the world. For example, I was fascinated by the fact that Joe couldn’t think of a direct translation for the English expression to save time. He thought about it for a few moments, then said, “In Spanish, we just don’t think of time that way—as something you can save.”

I’m excited to imagine the fresh ideas and perspectives that will come from learning more languages and getting to know people who speak them. And at the same time, actively exploring other languages is bound to make me a more skillful speaker (and writer) of English.

Chris calls Mastery of Learning “an evolutionary program designed to rekindle your curiosity and give you the tools to satisfy it.” He presents the course as a series of one-on-one training sessions. He customizes his presentation to suit the interests, needs, and schedule of the learner; in my case, there were five sessions, each about three hours long. Each session combines teaching, training in specific learning skills, and some very masterful coaching to bring clarity and focus to what you’re learning.

It’s essentially a course in learning to learn more effectively. But at the same time that Chris is working with the learner to cultivate some very useful learning skills, he introduces fascinating concepts about cognitive science and points the participant toward lots of sources for more learning.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about what Mastery of Learning teaches; if you’re curious, visit the web site, send Chris e-mail, or better yet, give him a call at 713.439.1442 and ask him about it—he’ll tell you anything you want to know!

Characterizing Mastery of Learning as “evolutionary” is not an exaggeration. The course had a huge impact on me. The module on idea-mapping and the writing technique called looping helped get me “unstuck” in my writing efforts. Someone (or perhaps several someones) had introduced me years ago to the exercise called mind-mapping or idea-mapping. I learned idea-mapping as the practice of quickly jotting down words or phrases in a nonlinear arrangement on big pieces of paper to see what connections or flashes of inspiration might come out, a sort of written word-association test. I’ve used it with some success as a creative brainstorming tool. But Chris suggested a lot of other uses for it: as a tool for planning; for note-taking; for organizing ideas (as an alternative to outlining); for decision-making; and for finding new insight into familiar ideas.

Looping is a technique for writing. It’s a simple idea: as you’re writing, whenever the flow of ideas seems to dry up, you keep you pen or pencil on the paper and draw little loops until something starts to come again. Since I almost never write longhand—my hand is much too slow to keep up with my brain—Chris let me adapt the idea to writing on the computer. When I find myself with no words to type, I drum the fingers and thumb of my right hand on the keyboard, producing something like this:

;lkj ;lkj ;klkj ;lkkj ;lkj ;lj ;kkj ;lkj ;lkkj ;lkkj 

The value of this trick is that it keeps your attention on the activity at hand. Instead of wandering off the page, your eyes remain focused on the paper or computer screen, and your mind stay in your writing “space” or frame of mind. Before long, the words always start flowing again.

Chris incorporates this method in an exercise I’ve found very useful—a series of timed free-writing sessions in which the participant writes in stream-of-consciousness mode, then reviews the results, then writes some more, then reviews again, etc. I’m not going to elaborate on the method, because if I tried to teach you how to do this exercise on your own, you’d miss out on everything Chris adds to the lesson—a deeper explanation of the rationale for using the technique and coaching to help the participant figure out its value for him. Besides, I’d rather leave my readers curious about this remarkable course!

I’ve turned these two techniques into a daily ritual for flexing my writing muscles and stimulating my creativity. Early in the morning, before the workday has had a chance to beat the crap out of me, I sit down at my laptop and do a free-writing exercise. Some days I produce a thousand words or so of nonsense or ranting. But other days, something encouraging emerges from the gibberish—the outlines of a new writing idea, or a few words that capture a flash of inspiration, or some insight into a psychological or intellectual problem I’ve been puzzling over. Some days, I stop when I’ve done the exercise for the prescribed amount of time, but on others, I keep going for as long as the topic keeps my interest.

After the writing exercises, on most days I spend 10 or 15 minutes idea-mapping whatever is on my mind. Usually, the free-writing exercise yields some central theme or striking thought (a “center of gravity,” as Chris would call it), which I make the basis for an idea-map. For example, on November 6 of last year, my free-writing exercise turned into some reflections on organizing. (At the time, I had recently begun designing a system for planning my days so that I’d make better use of my time and get done more of the things that are important to my personal development. That project is ongoing.) When I was ready to set the writing aside, I launched into an idea map on the topic of “What Must a System of Time Management and Organization Accomplish?”:

> Click on the image to see a larger version. <

I draw my idea maps in a 12 x 10 sketch book. Sometimes I find myself idea-mapping away from home on legal pads or whatever scraps of paper I can lay my hands on, and I tape these into the book as well.

Another benefit I received from Mastery of Learning was some of Chris’ insights into what’s going on out there in the world of ideas. Most notably, Chris introduced me to the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) Conference, an annual meeting of minds in Monterrey, California. The conference features several days of speeches, presentations, and performances (the “TED Talks”) by leaders in a wide variety of disciplines—doctors, scientists, artists, musicians, philosophers, spiritual leaders, community activists, writers, politicians, etc.

Chris played the video podcast of a particularly interesting lecture (Sir Ken Robinson—you can find his talk here) and stimulated my appetite for more. I went to the TED Talks page and downloaded a couple of dozen podcasts, which I’ve been listening to during some of my daily walks at Memorial Park. Almost without exception, they’ve stirred my curiosity about the topics and themes they address. I hope to post some TED Talk–inspired articles here as soon as I get around to writing them. Right now, the one that’s percolating in the back of my mind is something about Aubrey DeGray’s talk (I’ll provide a link when I can get to the site) on the state of the science of gerontology. He posits that there might be people alive today who will live to be 1,000 years old, and I find that idea greatly intriguing!

I’ve been recommending the Mastery of Learning course to everyone I know who seems interested in learning and getting more out of life. I’ve only touched on a fraction of the topics that the course covers here. And six months after going through the program, I’m still discovering new ways that the content and learning techniques are rippling through my consciousness. I’ll share more with you as I discover them!