'The Way of the small' leads to huge insights

Where do you search for wisdom? The choices are endless. But I find that I learn more from listening to the voices of those around me. Some of these voices talk from the pages of books. Others come from the web. But the ones that matter most and to whom I owe the greatest debt in learning how to live are those who talk to me across coffee or dinner or on the street. The vast majority of these people are students.

Caro, as she goes by, is an international student from Barranquilla, Colombia.

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"Había tenido que promover 32 guerras, y violar todos sus pactos con la muerte y revolcarse como un cerdo en el muladar de la gloria, para descubrir con casi cuarenta años de retraso los privilegios de la simplicidad."

“He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dung heap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late”

-One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

A Defense of the Small

The world needs changing. Although the times might have somewhat improved from a “nasty, brutish, and short” life for most cited by Thomas Hobbes, the world can still be a cruel place. It can be a place of ignorance and disdain, a place where injustices and crimes occur daily, a place destroyed by those who live in it, with no regard for those to come.

The world needs changing. The world needs people—young people, smart people, ambitious people—to lead the change. And why shouldn’t it be us? At my research university in the US, there is no lack of ambitious students. Students with ideals and high moral ground; students who start social movements and lead protests. Students who see the world we live in as a young child that has been driven astray—or maybe never was in the right path to begin with—. These people are necessary. Whenever I encounter one of them—for I myself am not part of these select few—I experience awe and admiration.

But I am here to tell you that there is another way. There are two paths that lead to change. One of them is the aforementioned one.

The other is the way of the small.

They way of the small is a way of living. Perhaps the easiest way to explain it is to say what it is not: the way of the small is not about going abroad to some suffering third-world country and saving starving children, or single-handedly defeating a drug mafia. Rather, it is the opposite: it is a deeply individualistic movement that focuses on improving the life you already have. It is about making yourself so happy on a daily basis that your joy becomes contagious to others.

This is easier said than done. The way to do this is to build strategically a methodical system of happiness. By this I mean to identify those things that occur constantly in our life that affect us: the tiny details that leave us with a smile, or those nuisances that manage to annoy us. This approach includes identifying key recurring situations as well: things that happen over and over in our life and to which we usually react in the same manner. To identify these things and our reactions to them is in itself a hard task: it demands a constant self-awareness that requires commitment and energy. Without this carefully collected self-knowledge, it is impossible to purposefully make yourself happy.

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Think about self-awareness as an ongoing, never ending process. Self-awareness in daily life will always be necessary simply because you as an individual are not a static unchanging entity. The things that might have deeply touched you or affected you in the past will probably not be the same in the future. People change. The key lies in focusing in those events of your daily life that both affect you greatly and are within your own personal control. Establish a system: do it so that those things that make you happy occur regularly. Also make sure to reduce to the extent possible those situations that cause you anguish, sadness, or anxiety; for example, whenever I don’t get at least eight hours of sleep, I find myself in a terrible mood. This tiny detail makes things go horribly wrong the next day. Usually the reason why I don’t sleep enough is simply because I take my computer with me to bed. The solution then is quite simple-- my computer is simply not allowed inside my room. Whenever I go to bed I follow the same routine and my computer is not a part of it. Such a tiny detail like this has exponential repercussions in my daily life.

This is what I mean by establishing a system: once the system is in place I don’t have to make a decision and I don’t have to rely in my strength of will nor waste any of my energy. The goal is to make individual rituals of happiness a constant part of your daily routine. These rituals will vary from person to person. A friend of mine, for example, enjoys making a specific fruit smoothie for breakfast every morning. Although not everyone derives the same joy from smoothie making, for her, this little ritual is the trademark of a good day. The system functions in the same manner to avoid bad situations. If in the past every time you have missed your 9 AM class because you went to bed at 2 AM, chances are that if you go to sleep late, you will miss your 9 AM. Start viewing your fixed reactions as laws of physics. You know that if you drop something it will fall to the ground. Treat your reactions to the constant situations in your life with the same inevitability.

I can’t stress enough how important it is that your rituals of happiness are things over which you hold most, if not all of the control. This is why developing and having a craft is such an important part of the way of the small. A craft can be any activity. It can range from sweeping the floor to coding Javascript. It is an activity that you do constantly, if not everyday, something in which you are constantly improving, and something you eventually become very good at. The personal satisfaction and fulfillment that comes from having a craft—a personal, deeply individualistic craft—is indescribable.

                  The benefit of the way of the small is that it makes room for great moments in your life.It frees up time and energy for unexpected situations to occur. It is this basic state of constant happiness that invites in other people and creates random, fun, unexpected situations. The way of the small is a way to create movement in the outside world by going deeper within you. It is a commitment to the ferocious pursuit of your own individual happiness. For most of us, life does not consist of great, transcendental moments, or life-altering occurrences (although it certainly does have them). Life is made by the daily, the nuisances, the tiny details. The way of the small is a way to change the world. Your picture won’t be printed in the first page of a newspaper nor will you get a Nobel Peace Prize. But you will have beauty, and you will have joy, and you will have the love of those that surround you. And, to me, that is what counts in the end.

Caroline Dahmen

It is hard for me to write anything that could add much to the Caro’s insights. I think if Caro wanted to she could take these words and become an inspirational speaker and earn quite a nice living.

Wisdom is different than knowledge and this college student has far more wisdom than most people I have met. She also has science on her side. Data demonstrates that developing habits of body and mind as she recommends is a sure way to increase productivity and mental health.

I am unsure if students today as a whole have come to know themselves better than students of my generation, but Caro has taught me that it is not age that matters when it comes to wisdom. I know Caro enough to say she is widely read, comfortable talking to anyone, and perhaps more important than anything else, curious. She asks questions of others and herself and does not settle for the superficial. The small, the delicate detail, ‘the little unremembered acts of kindness’ (WC Williams), the red wheelbarrow (Williams again) are entries into the world before us, the world we walk through but seldom see with our tired and habit-driven eyes. Caro has let me walk through the world using her expert eyes and for that I am grateful.

As many of the entries on this blog demonstrate, students have much to teach us, those who are supposedly more experienced and have at one level or another been crowned with some degree or recognition for being an expert of some sort. To me the designation of mastery is often a doorway that leads away from openness to others who have not attained a similar rank or recognition. I know, if I know anything, that blindness and insight sit on our shoulders whispering--sweet somethings and nothings. I believe as long as I follow the paths set down by students I will continue to learn.

Today, for example, a student taught me about a new way of communicating globally that has started by one of the founders of TED. Another taught me about the Soviet strategy of using troop exercises as a method of intimidation against Finland. Another gave me insight about playing Polo professionally. Another bout staring up a music business in Turkey, and another about doing research on diabetes since this disease affects poor and under-represented populations at rates much higher than those not in these categories. Another talked about using multimedia in a college newspaper, and another about Tiger Moms. And another about start ups on the West Coast and in China. These are, as the poet Wallace Stevens has written (and I have quoted here before), 'merely instances', and the list is far from complete, even for today.