Free at last. Fourteen days off and 397 pages to read. Christmas time, and soon the year 2024 – finally! I had been longing for peace and quiet, for nature, and for conversations with people who are not usually close at hand in my everyday bustle.
On my odyssey home (11.5 hours in total, four of them standing in the corridor, five sitting in the corridor and three sleeping in a four-seat compartment), I met many strangers. With some of them I had pleasant and deeper conversations, but mostly I listened, irritated, to the particularly loud ones. Wherever I picked up Douglas Abrams’s book and read a few pages, I noticed curious glances beside and across from me. It seemed as though “joy”, or perhaps “anticipation” in view of the approaching Christmas season, struck a chord with many people.
Or the other way round: how ironic to read a book about joy on an overcrowded train, in stuffy air and among loud strangers. In any case, an older man, around 65 I would guess, a former general practitioner and sports physician, eventually plucked up the courage to ask me: “What is the book about? Would you recommend it?”
I first told him that in September I had started a ten-month movement trainer programme and was reading various books as part of it. As a sports physician, an additional qualification he had taken purely for fun, he found it hard to understand what Movement actually is and, above all, where I wanted to go with it professionally. I often come across this question mark on people’s faces. Over the course of our conversation, however, we came to the conclusion together that I pursue Movement primarily for the same reason he had once started his sports medicine qualification: for the joy of movement. And although these words sound so worn out, the feelings described in the book are exactly the ones I experience in movement: amusement, contentment, excitement, relief, gratitude, jubilation, ecstasy, wonder and, every now and then, a little schadenfreude. The warm exchange with the doctor helped me take to heart that the only thing I need for this is already there. Movement has always come easily to me and has always filled my daily life, probably thanks to the enthusiasm for movement of the people closest to me. To the question “What do you want to do with it professionally?”, however, I could not come up with an answer that felt right to me. Instead, the thought arose: “Do I even want to do anything professional with it?”, out of fear of losing my joy in movement. When I read Tom Weksler’s newsletter a few days ago, I was able not only to add a new perspective to my tangle of thoughts but actually to untangle it:
“Realizing we “automatically” follow a physical path with every life challenge, many times without consciously engaging, can reveal many deficits and powers we have inside. The physical practice is the ritual of seeing these things, giving them the eye level gaze that they deserve. They are not “work” just as much as they are not a “creation”. They are our natural perspective mechanism that consequentially become our actions, identities and destinies. I´ve found that moving with them daily is a fair compromise for living with them in peace”
The feeling of schadenfreude stuck with me because of a study I read recently. By coincidence, it also fits with what the two men talk about in the book. In their 2009 journal article, Lieberman and Eisenberger vividly describe how our brain processes pleasure and pain. For simplicity, they divide the brain regions into a pain network and a pleasure network and describe the circumstances under which each is activated. Remarkably, they found that the brain does not distinguish between social and physical stimuli, or in other words, that social pain is “measurable”. Accordingly, physical pain is assigned to the pain network together with exclusion, grief after loss, unfair treatment and negative social comparison. Physical wellbeing, in turn, is assigned to the so-called pleasure network together with having a good reputation, fair treatment, cooperation, charitable giving and also schadenfreude. In a biological sense, then, schadenfreude is anything but unhealthy for the person feeling it; it is more like a free cocktail of happiness hormones. In my opinion, the book’s description of it as “the unhealthy delight in the suffering of others” could therefore be put a little more kindly. From my own experience, I can say that such moments, shared with the right person, strengthen rather than weaken the bond between people.
The Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu talked about this in connection with humour, a chapter I particularly enjoyed reading:
“It is much better when there is not too much seriousness. Laughing and joking is much better. […] when you laugh wholeheartedly – and not artificially – it is very good for the heart and for your health in general. […] Laughter is said to be the most direct connection between two people.”
For more lightness in life, we can start with ourselves, as the Archbishop makes clear with the following words: “If we just learn to take ourselves a little less seriously, that is very helpful. We see how ridiculously we behave.” I have often been told that I can laugh at myself. I think the brutal honesty of my siblings helped me with this. Mercilessly yet trustingly, we made fun of all of each other’s quirks and so held up a mirror to our own absurdity.
To return to the study mentioned earlier, I would summarise its findings as follows: eating chocolate is equivalent to receiving compliments, and a kick in the shin is similar to the effect of a sincerely meant insult. Two conclusions can be drawn from this: on the one hand, physical and mental health should be treated as equal (Dalai Lama: “Mental pain is just as bad as physical pain […]”), which unfortunately does not yet happen enough in society; on the other hand, the importance of kind and social togetherness. The book, and in particular the chapter “Nothing beautiful comes without some suffering”, offers a different or additional perspective on the findings of this study. According to it, joy and pain are not parallel or clearly separable, but rather emotional layers that unfold one after the other, often over a long period of time, and bring about a change in attitude. In other words:
“A little suffering – however intense – is a necessary part of life, because it helps us develop compassion. […] (Nelson Mandela) became more magnanimous through his suffering in prison and was able to listen to the other side as well. He discovered that those he regarded as enemies were human beings like him, with fears and expectations. Without those twenty-seven years, I believe, we would never have known such a compassionate, magnanimous and empathetic Nelson Mandela. […] Concern and compassion for the wellbeing of others are the source of happiness.”
So besides the real conversations I had on my journey, I was also following a very special conversation in my mind and, looking back, set out on an inner journey of my own: the four-day conversation between “two of the most important spiritual leaders of our time”.
I chose this book because I was very curious to explore the subject I spend so much time with from a Buddhist and a Christian perspective. My curiosity was sparked precisely because the exchange between the two was complemented by current scientific findings. This helped me understand what was said better and grasp it for myself and my own life. At the same time, it raised so many questions in me, some of which I tried, in vain, to answer with friends. In the end, though, perhaps it is just as a woman in one of my workshops once said: “Honestly, you just have to be smart enough to take out whatever helps you in that moment or in your life right now, whether it’s science or religion.” I think she really hit the nail on the head.
The year 2023 was marked by crises and disasters, and in my personal life, too, I had a few mountains to climb, so that my level of frustration was constantly over the limit. I found the authentic and human way the two related to each other, and their appreciation for one another even though they did not always agree, utterly refreshing. It showed me how important an attitude like this is for peaceful coexistence in this world to be possible. At first, I lost myself in the endless information online, wanting to learn more about the lives of these prominent figures. In doing so, I treated myself to a little tutoring in the history of China and Tibet and of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Against the background of the personal stories of the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, their statements do not sound like the ones you can read everywhere on social media and in self-help books: “According to another Tibetan saying, it is in fact painful experiences that shed light on the nature of happiness, because they form a sharp contrast to joyful experiences” (Dalai Lama, p. 160). Or on what you can do concretely as an individual to find calm amid chaos: “You will be surprised by joy the moment you stop being so self-absorbed” (Desmond Tutu, p. 165).
And now that the 397 pages have been read and the conversation still echoes, it is the future moments and actions that matter. The difficulty always lies in remembering all this in (mostly uncomfortable) situations and acting accordingly. Perhaps “mental immunity” widens the space between action and reaction by a millisecond, allowing us to respond “appropriately”. And Desmond Tutu’s words will help ease the sorrow whenever a reaction turns out less appropriate, because such reactions are all too often simply human.
