The Upward Spiral: Joy, Contentment, Interest, and Love
. . . there’s a certain scope in that long love Which constant spirits are the keepers of, And which, though taken to be tame and staid, Is a wild sostenuto of the heart, A passion joined to courtesy and art Which has the quality of something made, Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent, Like a rose window or the firmament.
RICHARD WILBUR
As the renovation came to an end, Susie and I were both conscious, as I’ve said, that it marked an outward and visible sign of a new chapter beginning in our partnership. As a result of the mountain of decisions we’d had to make, ours had become a more conscious partnership. We had had to work together to create our vision. How did we want the space to look, to feel? What was its function to be? We were continually forced to ask: What, exactly, were we creating together?
It’s impossible to overstate how important it can be to create a house—a home—together. Remember Khalil Gibran: “Your house is your larger body.” For a couple, this means that our house is the “larger body” of our relationship. It becomes, as we refine it, the perfect living, breathing container for us. Gibran goes on to talk about the life of the house: “It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream?”
Well, yes, I think our house surely dreams.
On that Saturday evening after the celebration with Diane and Dave, as Susie and I got to talking, we acknowledged to one another that we had been given something wonderful: this friendship, this partnership, this commitment. An unlikely find at our age. A good-enough key to our hearts. Now, what did we want to create out of it?
I wondered: Could we take our easy intimacy and natural companionship out for a spin? Could we have a relationship consciously dedicated to our individual and mutual thriving? Was this even possible? I had never before dared to dream of such a thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson often said—and Mahatma Gandhi frequently quoted him—“you should always be doing experiments in living. The more experiments, the better.” I realized that what Susie and I were doing was an experiment. An experiment in living.
So why not do it as consciously as possible? That evening, sitting on the new floor with the dogs, I floated an idea. I can’t remember now exactly how I said it, but probably it was something dorky, like, “Sue, you and I have already committed to being partners. Why not commit to becoming each other’s intentional ally in creating conscious lives?” (I hope it wasn’t that stilted, but it might well have been. I’ve probably been directing weekend workshops for too long.) In other words, let’s take what we’ve stumbled upon and do it intentionally. Like Dolly Parton often says: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”
I loved the fact that Susie didn’t roll her eyes at such stuff. Yes, she rolled her eyes at the big house on Madison Avenue, and at my insistence that we use my grandmother’s Limoges china for dinner parties. But not this. Not this frank talk about what we were doing together.
So I continued. “Susie, what do we value together? What are we aiming at here?”
I couldn’t help thinking of “the Compton Code.” (Remember it, from Chapter 6?) I had always been intrigued by the consciousness of that code, and by the obvious fact that the Compton family had actually lived into the code in so many ways. They had operationalized their explicitly stated aspirations in their lives.
When I go to Florida in the winter, I’ve noticed recently that many residents in my little town now have wristbands with their city’s communal intentions written on them: “ONE HUMAN FAMILY,” they say, in big letters. And then, in smaller type: “Unity . . . Equality . . . Diversity.” Big posters and smaller bumper stickers are posted. They declare: “All human beings are born as equal members of ONE HUMAN FAMILY.” These words and phrases are everywhere you look. I realized immediately that these little wristbands—and the signs on the street—had power. They had captured the community’s own aspirations in words and then enabled the community to live into them.
Here’s a notion I read in a book of Eastern wisdom: You are much more likely to hit the target if you aim at it. I have come to see that aspiration really does thrive on this kind of simple clarity. Name it and claim it.
So that night after our dinner with Diane and Dave, Susie and I sat up late on our living-room floor with Squirt and Timmy snoring, stretching, or simply wandering around dazedly beside us as we mapped out our territory. What did we want to create?
We came up with a list of intentions for our partnership. This list went through various iterations over the subsequent months, but I recently found the original version—the one that we had scrawled out that night on the back of a Verizon bill. (Well, to be precise, Sue found it. I called out to Sue the other morning, “Susie, do you know where that credo is that we wrote? I can’t find it.” Naturally, Susie knew exactly where it was. One of her many specialties: She always knows where everything is. Within five minutes, there it was in her hand, crumpled and coffee stained.)
I had written “OUR INTENTIONS” in capital letters across the top of the sheet with a stubby pencil the contractors had left behind. Then, scribbled beneath, was the following list:
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I was supposed to have taken that scribbled-out list and fleshed it out, organized it, and typed it up. Then we were going to post it somewhere in the house where we—and everyone else—could see it. For inspiration. For clarity. Like those wristbands in Florida.
Actually, that never happened.
But something even better happened. The process of articulating our vision and writing it down facilitated our living into that list. The list hung in the air. It stayed in our heads. And now here it is again, showing up in this book.
(By the way, the power of intention is a marvel. We now know—actually know, scientifically—that “intention” has a real effect. Indeed, there is now a scientific name for intention: passive volition. Passive volition. Science has found that our intentions tend to bend our lives in the direction of those very intentions. The ancients knew this. Turns out, there is a stage on the path of Theravada Buddhism that requires merely the Intention to go there. Really. It says in the scripture, “Intend to . . .”)
Susie and I had made our declaration. “This is what we intend.” There was something thrilling about it for me. Like exploring new territory.
That Saturday night I went to bed happy. I realized that I had never had an explicit ally in living like this before. Now, it seems, in my sixties, I had stumbled into a wholehearted partnership. Okay, it wasn’t a romantic attachment. But it was what life was bringing to me. I decided to go all in. Let life do it.
Sue and I have had an intense period of happiness. Certainly it has been the happiest time in my life. I have said it over and over again to my friends, with no small degree of wonder: “The sixties are the happiest time of my life.” (By the way, there are now studies that show that this is true for many people.)
Oh, this doesn’t mean that we do not quarrel, have the occasional icy evening, or from time to time enjoy getting away from one another. Sue complains about my sloppiness in the kitchen and my irritating sense of entitlement. I complain about her stubbornness, the fact that she doesn’t really like to go out to artistic events, and the bewildering way in which she almost always (quietly) wins the big battles. Our fights—low-key as they are—are usually over in a day, and end with a make-up hug.
But the underlying feeling tone, almost always, is a sense of quiet happiness and contentment.
If I had to describe this “happiness” in more detail, I would have to simply call it the remarkable and persistent presence of joy. Yes, that’s it. Joy is the hallmark of my relationship with Susie. Our daily life is simply saturated with it. “Joy in the little things,” we wrote as item number one in our credo. The dogs. The sweetness of our long talks. The fun of decorating and perfecting the house—placing things just so. The delight of working together in the garden, savoring our friends, savoring our work. I mean, on a daily basis, Susie and I actually have fun.
So, for the last few years, I have been pondering a question: What, exactly, is joy?
In the classical yoga tradition, joy is seen as the inevitable fruit of a visceral knowledge of the good, and the beautiful. Squirt. Timmy. Susie. Kindness. Beauty in the home and garden. The little things. Charity. Compassion.
In Christianity, joy is seen as “the first fruit of the spirit.” (St. Paul says so, in his letter to the Galatians, chapter 5, verse 22. He wrote, in this letter to his friends in Galatia: “But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, and faith.”) Joy, in the Christian tradition, is seen as one of the highest of spiritual experiences. It comes from feeling deeply, in our bodies and minds, our true relationship with the Divine—our own sense of oneness with the good, the true.
In the Buddhist tradition, the mind-state of joy is recognized as one of the four “immeasurables.” It is an expansive state of mind that gives rise to a sense of unity with all beings, a profound state of well-being that is said to be unbounded. In other words, there is no ceiling to the happiness it creates. Joy is said to be one of the four Divine Abodes—the abodes where the Gods live. (The other three Divine Abodes, by the way, are loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity.)
At times I have wondered: Why is this persistent experience of joy happening for me now? Is it age? (The fifteenth-century ecstatic poet Kabir—an expert in joy—thought so. He wrote: “In your twenties you did not grow because you did not know who your Lord was.”) Had age given Susie and me a healing perspective? Was it understanding, finally, what really matters and ditching the other stuff? Was it the experience of no longer really giving a shit what anyone else thinks?
I think this persistent happiness has altered me. I notice, as I write this, that over the course of my seven years with Susie, I have been changed. Others notice it, too. I am less driven. More fun. More easygoing. I take myself both less seriously and more seriously at the same time. And there is no doubt about it: I am much more resilient. (Paw prints on the sofa? Who cares?)
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I have wondered occasionally: Is there any science that can describe what is happening in my relationship with Sue? Any science that could give us a map for understanding our mutual state of well-being? That could help us be more articulate about it?
As it turns out, yes, there is. Indeed, the new branch of Western psychology called “positive psychology” is just now investigating this area of optimal human functioning, especially as it pertains to the relationship between happiness and the experience of secure attachment.
The theory that best describes what is happening to Susie and to me is laid out in the work of Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who for decades has been working on a theory called “the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.”
Fredrickson became interested in four positive emotions in particular: joy, contentment, interest, and love. Her work caught my attention a couple of years ago because in so many ways, these were all feelings that had been in abundance in my relationship with Susie. Turns out that joy, contentment, interest, and love are feelings—and what the contemplative traditions would call “mind-states”—that emerge quite naturally from the experience of secure attachment.
Up to this point, in the fledgling field of positive psychology, these positive emotions had been seen simply as momentary markers of well-being—happy-but-fleeting side effects of secure bonding. But Fredrickson showed that not only does secure attachment give rise to these passing states of well-being, but that these states then in turn produce durable traits of character. (In other words—over time, they change you.) As Fredrickson says in her pivotal paper on the subject: “. . . positive emotions produce optimal functioning, not just within the present, pleasant moment, but over the long-term as well.” They are themselves the mechanism for more reliable and ongoing states of well-being, happiness, and emotional resilience. As we’ll see, what happens as these “states” turn into “traits” is a kind of upward spiral of increasing creativity, self-efficacy, and self-esteem.
Yes. This seemed to be what was happening—slowly—for Sue and for me as a result of our partnership.
How, precisely, does the process work? Fredrickson gives a clear description in her pivotal article, published in 2004. The main point is this: these positive emotions, says Fredrickson “appear to broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources.”
Positive emotions “broaden momentary thought-action repertoires”? This makes total sense. Think about it. When the mind is colored by one of these states (joy, contentment, etc.) it becomes more expansive, less narrow. There comes with joy, for example, a sense of the widening of horizons. (Expansive. Just as the Buddhists said.) We see the whole, global picture. In the moment, feelings of joy, interest, contentment, and love allow us a sense of expansiveness, of perspective, and allow us to be more flexible in our thinking and choices. In turn, Fredrickson found, these more expansive states bring a kind of vast perspective on the vicissitudes of life that supports a trait called “equanimity”—or emotional evenness, unshakeability.
The easiest way to make sense of Fredrickson’s notion of “broadening” is by comparing these positive states to their opposite, so-called negative, states: those states of fear, anger, and even terror with which we are all intimately familiar. I’m sure you’ve had this experience: A stray dog approaches. He looks mean, and menacing. What happens in your nervous system? Our thoughts and feelings narrow to prepare us to either fight or flee—to escape, to attack, or to expel the invader. In a life-threatening situation, a narrowed thought-action repertoire promotes quick and decisive action that carries direct and immediate benefit. (After all: these are the specific actions that worked best to save our ancestors’ lives and limbs in real life-or-death situations on the savannas of Africa where we evolved.) The sympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system that controls fight-or-flight) becomes hyper-aroused in the interest of quick and effective action—and that selfsame arousal triggers default mechanisms and highly patterned reactions, rather than well-thought-through, creative responses. There is a good reason for these highly patterned responses, of course. They helped us to survive on those dangerous savannas. And we still need them at times. But in nonthreatening situations, the narrowing of our thought-action repertoire becomes inhibitive, restrictive, and mentally and emotionally constrictive.
Positive emotions work in just the opposite way. They promote feelings of safety and of well-being. They allow us to feel at ease with our self and the environment. And it turns out that along with this comfort and safety, something very interesting happens in our brain, in our nervous system, in our mind. You can imagine, can’t you? The mind opens up; it becomes more expansive; it opens to new and creative possibilities. We draw on more parts of the brain, and our brain circuits are connected in new and creative ways. We are able to experiment. To think creatively. To reflect.
There is plenty of research that documents this outcome. We are told, for example, that “two decades of experiments conducted by [A. M.] Isen and his colleagues . . . have documented that people experiencing positive affect show patterns of thought that are notably unusual, flexible, creative, integrative, open to information, and efficient.” Those that are experiencing positive affects “show increased preference for variety, and accept a broader array of behavioural options.” Positive affect, it seems, produces a “broad, flexible cognitive organization and ability to integrate diverse material.”
Let’s see how this works, especially with Fredrickson’s four primary emotions: joy, contentment, interest, and love. Take joy, for example—the first positive emotion investigated in Fredrickson’s work. Joy creates the urge to play, observes Fredrickson. This is a theme that should perk up our ears, because we’ve heard it regularly throughout this book.
We know that the urge to play is somehow deeply connected with secure attachment. Remember our friends Mary Main and Mary Ainsworth from our earlier discussion of attachment? As they were creating experiments to effectively assess the characteristics of the various forms of attachment, they came up with a brilliant strategy, which has since been called “the Strange Situation.”
How does the Strange Situation work? It’s ingenious: The parent is separated for a short time from the child—and then, under careful observation, reunited with the child. Investigators look closely at the child’s reaction when the parent reenters the situation. What do you imagine happens when a securely attached child is reunited with her parent? Well, she is momentarily delighted. She makes physical contact. She makes eye contact. And then, voila! She goes very quickly back to playing. She feels secure enough to play! It turns out that joy is one of the feelings that children experience in the presence of the secure object. (Honestly, what communicates joy better than the face of a happy, exuberant baby or toddler, reaching out for the good-enough dad or mom? Wide-eyed. Expectant. Expansive. Arms open. Securely attached. Immeasurable!)
As we grow, deepening experiences of inner security and the resulting joy create the urge to push the limits and to be creative, to try new things. We know that childhood play builds enduring intellectual resources by increasing creativity and fueling brain development. We know, too, that this is not just true of childhood play. Adults play in more complex ways—exploring sophisticated new intellectual pursuits, psychosocial engagements, and artistic pursuits. When we’re playing, we put things together in new ways. We throw off the shackles of mere convention—of default modes. This play both emerges out of, and further evokes, the most sophisticated form of human intelligence, so-called fluid intelligence. When fluid intelligence is operating, we are connected with the vast workings of the most sophisticated parts of the brain—the prefrontal cortex.
Play, Fredrickson points out, also builds enduring social resources: “Social play, with its shared amusement and smiles,” she writes, “builds lasting social bonds and attachments, which can become the locus of subsequent social support.” So, play “broadens-and-builds” on the emotion of joy, and integrates it more deeply into a life structure, and a personality structure. In fact: play itself is how we grow. (Indeed, as Winnicott points out, play is essential to all positive human development. Every stage of growth involves play—at higher and higher levels of complexity. We have seen this in our examination of attachment.)
But again: Play depends upon a requisite state of safety, and secure attachment. I can now see this so clearly as I look back on many of my deep friendships. In every case, as safety grew, the element of play increased—with Grandma, with Seth, with Mrs. Compton, with John Purnell. Can you see this in looking back at the stories I’ve told? In each case, creative play became more complex, more subtle, more intellectually and emotionally engaging after deep and trusting connection was established.
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And how about Fredrickson’s other positive emotions?
The positive emotion called “interest,” says Fredrickson, is a phenomenologically distinct emotion from joy, and it creates another set of outcomes. Interest creates the urge to explore, to take in new information and experiences, and to expand the self in the process. Interest sparks the urge to investigate more deeply, and this investigation broadens and builds by deepening knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. It creates knowledge and intellectual complexity. Interest draws us to want to see precisely how things work. (Fascination, as described in the previous chapters, is one of the deepest forms of interest.)
Interest, above all things, creates so-called “approach behaviors.” Indeed, Fredrickson and others see the most common function of all positive emotions as “facilitating approach behavior or continued action.” In these states of well-being, we are prompted to engage the world. To interact with the world. To partake in new activities—many of which, in the past, turned out to be evolutionarily very adaptive for the individual, the species, or both. Our instinct, when we feel secure, is to approach and explore novel objects, people, or situations—and this investigative behavior is highly adaptive. (Think: E. M. Forster with the shepherd lad.) When the mind is experiencing this positive emotion called interest, we engage with the world not because we are required to in some way, but because we deeply want to. We feel a part of it, interested in it, joined to it. We feel less separate from it.
For example, my increasing sense of safety and attachment to Seth sparked interest. This interest caused me to deeply want to approach him. To get to know him in the deepest ways. Likewise with John Purnell. With Grandma. The outcome of interest is investigation, and eventually, a deep longing to know “the other.”
Fear states—and indeed all states of aversion and other so-called constricted states—create just the opposite, causing us to want to withdraw, to avoid, to pull back. When colored by fear and aversion, the mind has a heightened sense of the danger of “the other” and of the unknown. Cults and constrictive social movements are all based on this fear of “the other.”
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Contentment is another positive emotion that occupies Fredrickson. Contentment is a wonderful mind-state. It involves feeling absolutely okay with how things are—with how we are—in the moment. (I had a teacher once—a well-known Indian swami—whose motto was: “Everything is absolutely okay!”) What is the fruit of this positive emotion? Well, contentment creates the urge to sit back and savor current life circumstances, and to integrate these circumstances into new views of the self and of the world. This savoring is another way of knowing, and it produces self-insight and changes in worldview. Again, it produces perspective.
Contentment gives rise to reflective states—like the deeply reflective states that Seth and I shared while we were painting day after day on the plank. Like the reflective states that Grandma and I shared on the front porch of 2800 East Main Street—and that Seth and I later shared while looking out over Lake Ontario. Indeed, contentment gave rise to the kind of reflective state that Susie and I shared sitting together on the living room floor that Saturday night. It allowed us to savor life. To roll it around on our tongues. To delight in it.
Contentment is one of the positive emotions that I continually learn from Susie. “It’s the little things,” she says so often. Savoring little moments with the dogs, a walk, an afternoon in the garden. Watching a Hallmark movie together. Savoring. It heightens that profound sense of well-being. Makes it go in deeper.
We now know that savoring positive emotions literally changes the brain over time. Neuroscientist and author Rick Hanson has studied this phenomenon in depth. He suggests that we should intentionally practice the experience of savoring. “Pay particular attention to the rewarding aspects of an experience,” he writes, “for example, [pay attention to] how good it feels to get a great big hug from someone you love. Focusing on these rewards increases dopamine release, which makes it easier to keep giving the experience your attention, and strengths its neural associations . . .”
We can hardly stress Hanson’s point enough. Over time, savoring positive emotions changes the brain, and the nervous system; it creates a stronger immune system, and a cardiovascular system less vulnerable to stress; it helps lift your mood, increases optimism, resilience and resourcefulness, and helps to counteract the effects of past trauma.
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And what about love? Love is viewed by Fredrickson as “an amalgam of distinct positive emotions . . . experienced within contexts of safe, close relationships . . . creat[ing] the recurring cycles of urges to play with, explore, and savour our loved ones.”
Wow. What a wonderful description of that hard-to-define state of love. And there it is: the relationship between a positive upward spiral of emotional states, and safe and secure attachments. And there is the description I was seeking of the happiness of my relationship with Susie: the urge to play, to explore and savor.
So, it must be clear to all of us—and really quite common-sensical—that these positive emotions broaden the scope of attention, cognition, and action, and that they build physical, intellectual, and social resources.
But there is even more to Fredrickson’s theory. Perhaps Fredrickson’s most stunning finding is that the personal resources accrued during states of positive emotions are durable. They outlast the transient emotional state that led to their acquisition. They truly build our entire repertoire of mind-states. They help us to build healthy and resilient coping methods. They not only make us feel good in the moment, but systematically expand our capacity to feel good in more enduring ways, and to be more effective in coping with life’s challenges. They produce resilient people. They rewire the brain.
“It’s good to take in the good,” says Rick Hanson simply. “Good feelings today increase the likelihood of good feelings tomorrow.”
Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues have studied not only relationships, but also work teams, and other kinds of teams, and found that these positive emotions, when sustained and systematically cultivated, create an upward spiral of increasing creativity, self-efficacy and self-esteem.
Susie and I had become just such a team—with the dogs, and indeed with our entire expanded tribe.
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A year or so into our experiment. I said to Sue, “You know something, Suze? I’ve never been happier in my life.”
There was simply no question about it. And others recognized it. It began with some subtle changes. My meditation started filling up with thoughts of gratitude and bounty. In general, I felt filled up. I had more love to give, and gave it more freely. As a result of my fear, I had been a fairly selfish or self-involved guy most of my life. Now, I slowly found myself more flexible, more generous, more willing to stretch.
And another change: I was becoming more resilient. I had always been a little bit of a hothouse flower—a little sensitive—which was by and large okay. But I’d also been self-indulgent, which was not so good. But after seven years with Susie, a sense of solidity and happiness emerged. I had never felt safer in my life. I was mirrored. Loved. Held.
Turns out, Susie and I had stumbled onto a formula for restoring—or creating for the first time—the experience of secure attachment, and then building a satisfying experience of happiness out of its components. Even at our late age.
And the coolest thing, at least for me, is that by and large, we’ve done this quite consciously. We’ve been aware that we are building something. Our attachment to each other and its many fruits have precisely “the quality of something made” that Richard Wilbur points to in the poem that serves as the epigraph to this chapter.
. . . there’s a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,
And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.
Notice that in the poem, Wilbur describes an upward cycle of ardency and ineffability. From a “good fiddle” to the “rose’s scent.” From the “rose window” to “the firmament.” Our conscious love partnerships begin with craftsman-like attention. But they expand in ever-upward spirals of ardency to embrace the firmament itself.
We have a treat in store for us in the next chapter, because we will be investigating an historic—and a truly epic—conscious partnership that demonstrates the very arc of which Wilbur writes. If ever there were a relationship that exemplifies Wilbur’s “passion joined to courtesy and art,” it is the Soul Friendship between Queen Victoria of England and her consort, Prince Albert. This Soul Friendship has, of course, become legendary. But, as it turns out, the gritty reality of their friendship is much more compelling than the lace-embroidered legend.