Tag: New York Times

Tend Your Own Garden

DEKale
The kale in my garden.

Roger Cohen has found the secret to happiness, he claims in his latest New York Times column, musing on what awaits his daughter after high school graduation. “Want to be happy?” he asks. “Mow the lawn,” he advises. “Life is a succession of tasks rather than a cascade of inspiration, an experience that is more repetitive than revelatory, at least on a day-to-day basis. The thing is to perform the task well and find reward even in the mundane.”

I appreciate the sentiment. Life isn’t always fun and exciting, and if you’re always expecting it to be, you’ll find yourself frequently disappointed. Still, this doesn’t represent the whole picture, especially for someone thinking about how they want to chart their path in life – or, later in life, whether and how to change course. Yes, you want to find joy in ordinary tasks like mowing the lawn, but first you need to decide: do you even want a lawn? That’s a better place to start.

Sure, Cohen is right that most things worthwhile don’t come easy – whether love, friendship, caretaking, advocating for what you believe in or making great art. But the key to happiness isn’t just putting your head down and doing what’s in front of you. It’s getting to know yourself well enough so you know what’s really important to you, naming those things, and making them central in your life as you pursue them.  Yes, there will be difficulties and challenges along the way, and a good end-goal in itself isn’t sustainable; you need to find pleasure in the path.  But if you haven’t stopped long enough to decide what you really want in life and let others decide that for you, it’s going to be really hard to do all those inevitably mundane repetitive tasks involved without getting really resentful.

I see this often with coaching clients. They’ve committed to some goal that intellectually they’ve decided has value – maybe it will earn them some money they need or status they’d like to have — but their heart isn’t really in it. They believe it’s what they should do, but it’s not a path they feel they’ve really chosen for themselves. So they suffer every step of the way.

Of course, there are lots of things we need to do that we don’t want to, and they often involve making a living. But within those requirements, we have some choices, even if only over the way we think about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. The more you feel like it’s the choice you’ve made for a purpose you’ve chosen – even if it’s unpleasant sometimes – the easier it will be to find joy in the process.

The same goes for mowing the lawn. I, for one, don’t really like lawns. Worse than lawns, to me, are lawnmowers. Using loud heavy machinery to cut delicate green plants seems absurd to me, and the sound of the motor ruins my whole experience of being outdoors to begin with. But that’s just me. Mowing the lawn wouldn’t be my path to happiness.

On the other hand, I have a garden at my home in Brooklyn, which I love. Yes, it requires a lot of work, and sometimes that feels like a burden. But I enjoy the peaceful feeling of being among plants and flowers and birds and squirrels, and I love just looking at it from my back deck or my office window. It takes the edge off urban life for me. So to me, pulling weeds out of the barrel of kale I’ve grown or clipping dead roses to encourage new buds to bloom is a pleasure. It’s the task I’ve chosen, and it has meaning to me.

Figure out what you want to plant, then tend it. That’s where true happiness lies.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Speak Up!

Woman Using MegaphoneI was reading Tara Mohr’s op-ed about how women at work are criticized more than men so need to learn to tolerate it better the day after I was chewed out by a colleague for speaking up about something I believed in. That colleague – a fellow board member on a local community organization — was another woman.

I lamented that even some women seem to have taken on the nasty habit of criticizing women more than they do men, particularly for how they express themselves. In this case, I was criticized for sending an e-mail saying I did not want to participate in a male colleague’s public criticisms of others in our community. (Privately, several other women on the board thanked me for speaking up.)

It’s a trivial example, but in other contexts, speaking up without fear of criticism can be a matter of life or death. Which makes me think Mohr and Kieran Snyder, whose study she cites, are on to something really important. Its implications reach far beyond women’s success in the workplace or community advocacy.

Take the problem of violent extremism, which has pulled the United States into war after war over the last 13 years and threatens to keep us at war for the indefinite future. At a recent conference I attended, Mossarat Qadeem, Executive Director of the Paiman Alumni Trust in Pakistan, spoke of a successful program she started to counter violent extremism in a remote part of Pakistan. It was all about educating women – first, in how to make a living, and second, in how to keep their sons from engaging in extremist violence. It’s necessary first to teach women how to make a living, she explained, because otherwise, they’d be financially dependent on their sons, as many long had been; they would therefore be powerless to speak up and influence them.

Mohr similarly explains that historically, women around the world learned not to speak up for themselves, or for what they believed was right, for fear of offending and being rejected by men, whom they depended upon financially. While that’s less true in the United States today than it was in the past, it’s still very true around the world.

Nicholas Kristof makes a related point in his New York Times column on Thursday, where he argues that instead of spending so many billions of dollars killing extremists around the world, the U.S. government ought to invest more in educating the women who live with them. Groups like the Islamic State have intentionally kept women ignorant, illiterate and oppressed to create “a petri dish in which extremism can fluourish,” writes Kristof. As in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan, education equals empowerment equals influence, and in the long run will be far more effective in preventing terrorism than will guns and bombs.

I’m not saying the United States never has to use its military to fight terrorism or that educating women and girls will solve everything; but it’s a far less costly, more humane and potentially long-lasting solution to many of the most entrenched problems we’re seeing around the world today. (On a related note, American women tend to be far more concerned about global warming than men; according to a 2014 Gallup survey, 60 of “concerned believers” are women, while two-thirds of global warming skeptics are men. An entire world of educated women could make a world of difference.)

Which brings me back to my community group, and Snyder’s study. Even those of us with the privilege of being highly educated and interacting with equally educated men have work to do when it comes to making sure our views are heard. Those views may sometimes elicit praise, but they’ll often elicit criticism, which, as Mohr notes, we’ll just have to get used to.

“Women today inhabit a transitional historical moment,” says Mohr. “We have tremendous new freedoms and new opportunities, but the legacy of a very different past is around us and inside us.”

That means we all have important choices to make about how we use those freedoms — and support them for others — as we move into the future.

 

 

 

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting