I have long reminded struggling students in my college writing course how much of human happiness is affected by where our minds dwell.
For those of us well beyond college with decades of life under our belts, it helps to contemplate how, as we age, our storehouse of experience gives us lots of material to call up memories and stories of beauty and strength, instead of those of tragedy and error. In pursuit of happiness, we can work to let our minds replay moments that give us peace rather than letting ourselves dwell in places that keep us stuck in sorrow or failure.
For LGBTQ people and those being racially profiled or targeted with harm in these times, dwelling in the political realities of now is hard to escape. Any person facing stress or threat of loss may struggle with happiness because stress can make it hard to focus on our own path ahead. Yet, so often still, it is the pains of the past that plague us and feel most inescapable.
I often recall to students an episode of Star Trek where the spaceship’s captain realizes he has come to dwell in a memory of his lost wife. Grief for him has turned into a room of pain in his mind that he can’t escape. All along the corridors in his mind, every door he opens leads to that story of her death. No matter how he tries to leave that room and that loss, he is stuck feeling his whole life will be lived in that memory of sorrow.
Humans have many paths to happiness, many neurological paths to feeling sensations of contentment and pleasure. How we see ourselves, the images and words that first rise in our heads when we are disappointed in ourselves often are deep-seated and come from childhood or the distant past. Sometimes these are ingrained in us so they work like the grooves on a record player, following what feels like a fixed path or a repeated skip caused by a deep scratch.
It’s powerful to contemplate what those rooms of pain and sorrow are for us or whose voice delivers our self critique. We can ask, does this connect to the story I tell myself or others about who I am or what I’ve accomplished? Do I skirt the edge of something I have overcome when that overcoming is an important signal of my strength?
We all can examine the places in our past where we dwell.
We can ask if this dwelling place feeds our happiness or does not serve it well.
Happiness looks different in each of us. No one recipe will work for us all. According to researchers, some kinds of happy people tend to be optimistic, gullible, more inclined to be content. Others rely on accomplishment and the dopamine triggers that signal success. Still others seek the ephemeral pleasures of the senses, while others understand the role of human connection and seek out those neurochemicals that stream out of us in response to touch or conversation.
What we often overlook is the power of memory and imagination to feed happiness. Henry David Thoreau was a minimalist and gay man known for wandering and gardening naked in New England around the shack he occupied on Walden Pond. He spent hours fantasizing about how he would repair the dilapidated buildings and prune the aging orchards on properties neighboring the pond. It was as if the achievements of these tasks, in his mind, fed the chemicals of accomplishment just as the actual acts might have. And indeed, science shows, acts of anticipation, planning, and even the imagination can pique our chemical of happiness just as the real actions would.
This, indeed, is why reading is powerful, why, for many, planning a trip or party can be its own exquisite activity. The part of the brain we are speaking of here is the prefrontal cortex. It’s our tool of conjecture and imagination, of visualization. For many of us, it is potent. For others it is a tool that can be honed to good ends.
When we speak of this idea of where we dwell, what rooms our mind finds itself visiting when it wanders, or what story of ourselves we tend to repeat, we are speaking of an important tool of happiness.
It takes practice to remember that we may pause when stuck in a room of pain, to remind ourselves to focus instead on a shaft of sunlight shining on the floor or a cloud passing overhead. It may take discipline or planning to catch ourselves mid-sentence in an unkind story about ourselves or a set of words repeated from our pasts. The key is to understand that we can turn ourselves away from that broken record, can learn to smell or taste or hear other rooms in our minds, not just those that hurt.
I hope I get to work with each of you to explore story as a tool for happiness and fulfillment, to skip the groove of a difficult record, and dwell in a place that gives you strength.
This July, Cole is bringing this work to us in Baja alongside filmmaker and oral historian
Mason Funk: Your LGBTQ+ Story: Write & Speak Your Truth.
It’s designed to help you locate the stories that have shaped you and decide which ones still deserve a central place. There’s writing, but also the experience of saying something out loud, in your own voice, with other queer people listening in a way that changes how it lands. You’ll come away with a piece of writing, a recorded oral history, and a clearer sense of what parts of your life you want to keep returning to.