Beyond the Slow and the Quiet

The second law of thermodynamics states that, without an energy input, any system in the universe will eventually decay into entropy and disorder. I’ve previously used this to explain that managing behaviour in a classroom needs constant work, but for the past three weeks I’ve been actively applying it to my happiness and it’s been a surprising success.

I know what makes me happy. The simple, towering love for my sons. Running, moving in nature, observing nature, using my body, reading. I also know that any variation of being penned in will eventually have the opposite effect; too long inside, too long in an urban area, too much noise, the malign seep of having not done enough, the growing crush of too much still to do. All or any of these can foster a frantic, stuttering panic making my fingers seem to tap an imaginary keyboard whilst my shoulders tighten towards my ears.

After a twenty-year crescendo built and then burst in my mid-thirties, I became much better at identifying unhappiness and removing or negating its causes. I quit my old job and got a new part-time one, I massively reduced my drinking, I stopped trying to win every aspect of my life and I accepted that antidepressants were not something to be ashamed of. Almost immediately my happiness improved dramatically, but I think this was mainly the removal of the unhappiness. I was doing those joyful things, but I had done them before anyway. What had changed was the motivation to do those things, with running providing the most obvious example.

I have run consistently for the past 15 years and took playing football very seriously for 15 years before that, but always to be better, to be faster. Inevitably I could never win, better and faster will always crash into best and fastest eventually. I must have reaped the physical and mental benefits of this regular activity but I presume they only served to lessen the overriding feeling of failure at not winning.

To then realise the majority of my life had been a journey I hadn’t chosen was especially revelatory for my running and I now ran purely because I liked it. It made me feel good and that was now the most important and only thing. No matter the pace, the distance, the race result. Running was a joy and that was it. This extended to most other aspects of my life. Work had been a continual source of stress and worry and so I pulled back to doing the minimum and learnt how to stop thinking about it when I got home. I realised that our lives didn’t fall to pieces if I hadn’t scrubbed the worktops and the day would continue just the same if I’d cut the grass or not.

The problem with removing unhappiness is that you can sometimes overlook chasing joy. Joy is not the absence of unhappiness. I’ve found it to be an active state that needs nourishment, that without attention will succumb to thermodynamics and decay. Not into unhappiness, just to neutrality. When I found that I could remove parts of my life that made me unhappy, for example not trying to run as fast as possible, it wasn’t a huge jump to not going for a run at all, to think that not worrying about missing a run was actually making me happy, when in fact it was just stopping me being unhappy. Similarly, removing the stress from my job stopped me being unhappy at work but didn’t make me happy there.

I stumbled across a video on Instagram along the common theme of ‘finding your joy’. I’d heard this many times before but the this particular person‘s interpretation resonated. “You need to FIND it. No-one’s coming to help you. Go and actively do it. Go and find your joy each day.” A simple lean on the word ‘find’ that gained a toe-hold and hung on.

So I wrote down the things that actively bring me joy. I know that my sons are such a fundamental part of me that I don’t need reminding to find them joyous, but it wasn’t hard to put together a list of wonderful things that on any day I might still neglect; running, moving in nature, reading, climbing. I added wanting more flexibility and opportunity with my job not so much as a joy but as a chance for a career to actively make me happy. I decided to see if I could do a bit of each of these things each days, and arrived at the following

Every day:

• Run/climb/workout - no minimum time

• Move outside - no minimum time

• Twenty minutes reading for pleasure

• Twenty minutes work on an Open University degree

I tried this for a couple of days, and then the reading made me realise I’d missed something. One of the most wondrous things I feel is an occasional alignment with something huge. A uncommon glimpse that everything is connected to everything else, that some old, wild currents are here, always were and always will be. I most often feel this when reading, but wanted to be able to articulate it myself and better so I’ve added twenty minutes of writing per day as well.

So far this has been manageable around a toddler, newborn and job, and I can definitely identify actively feeling joy at various points during the day. In the context of substack I’m excited to capture and solidify some of the vague, shifting thoughts I’ve got so will be trying to add these as often as twenty minutes a day will allow.

For now, thank you.

Stuart