I’m a sucker for articles promising to tell you the secret to happiness and satisfaction. Naturally I fell for a recent article in The Atlantic Online titled How to Want Less and subtitled, The secret to satisfaction has nothing to do with achievements, money or stuff.
The article is a trip into eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism, through the eyes of a westerner. The author, Arthur Brooks, humble-brags about his many professional achievements and how, after being very successful and presumably making a lot of money, he came to the realization that money and acclaim bring only momentary satisfaction. I couldn’t help but notice that this enlightenment came only after he had secured money and achievements and, apparently, he’s not taking vows of poverty or laboring anonymously but is, instead, promoting his new book by writing essays in one of the nation’s most prominent magazines.
It’s probably a safe bet that whatever pleasure I get from criticizing his hypocrisy isn’t on the path to enduring satisfaction. I read on anyway, propelled by bitter delight and also, it is true, by the interesting anecdotes and ideas in the essay. But, as is often the case when you revel in someone else’s foibles, I stubbed my brain on one of his questions: “And what about you?”
Fair enough. Game on. What brings me lasting satisfaction? With apologies to my lovely wife and our children of whom we are very proud, two other things immediately popped into my mind.
About the time we bought the dilapidated building which has become our house, I had a phone call with an old friend from college. He said, “Porter, remember, a man who doesn’t plant an orchard has lived an incomplete life.” I had and have no doubt that I am living an incomplete life and for reasons more numerous and significant than my failure to plant an orchard, but encouraged partly by my friend’s comment, I dug some saplings out of the woods and planted a row of wild apples along one edge of our little meadow. Along the roadside, a safe distance back from the plow, I planted a maple and a beech.
The saplings, spindly, weak-looking little things, almost made me sad when I looked at them. As the years went on I added more trees along the roadside, a tiny white oak seedling brought to me by a distant relative, cousin of my grandmother or something, who, like me, was a tree lover, a red oak to go with the white oak, a couple of blight resistant elms which were a birthday present from my mother, a black walnut from a nut I picked up along the road in East Calais, and, a few years ago, a pair of red spruce seedlings planted where they will eventually block the headlights that cut across our bedroom window as cars come around the corner on our road.
It’s been 28 years since I planted those first, pathetic trees. Some of them are 25 feet tall now. They all make me satisfied every time I walk under them and the satisfaction only increases as time passes.
Ten or fifteen years ago, raging at my propane bill, I bought some old solar hot water panels from a guy on Craigslist. He’d bought them from another guy on Craigslist. They were old, 1970s era panels, three of them, a pump and a controller for $400 bucks.
I mounted the panels on the roof of a shed and started digging a ditch for the pipes to carry the hot water into our house. Our son was eight or ten at the time and he had some friends over. These young boys had never seen a man dig a ditch with a shovel. They were intrigued and before long they were experiencing the joy of ditching-digging themselves. They didn’t get that far, but I was grateful for every foot.
I didn’t know how to wire the panel controller and pump and I ruined one of the panels with my incompetence. This was before I knew that you could learn how to do anything on YouTube. But eventually I experimented enough to figure out how to wire the panel controller so it would turn the pump on when the panels were hotter than the water in the storage tank and turn the pump off when the tank water was hotter.
In the summer when the panels are active, every time I put my hand on the pipe that brings the heated water into the house, it makes me satisfied, pure, warm satisfaction.
It turns out that when I fell for the silly article on the secret to satisfaction, the answer was right in front of me, plant trees and have the sun heat water, just a modern version of the old Buddhist adage, chop wood, carry water.