I don’t really know what “happy” is.
My entire life I’ve felt a sense of purpose; at times merely the drive to do something, and to do it with everything I’ve got. At other times, that purpose has been much more clear: When I was studying math at UC Berkeley, it was to become a mathematician. When I left UC Berkeley and became an EMT, it was help people. When I left EMS to be a wildland firefighter over the summer, it was externally to fight fire, and internally to do something that sucked, and become stronger from it. Purpose is a constant presence in my life, but rare are the times I’ve felt happy. Those times are usually more emotional (feeling happy versus being happy). Halfway through the summer fire season, on the Borel fire, we had been spiked out in a steep canyon, and the days had been hard. It had been an active fire with some exciting days, and little sleep. It was hot, the terrain sucked, the digging was awful, and the brush was thick. On that fire, as with many, I had slipped into a state of survival mode, simply focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. I was exhausted, sore, weak, and broken down. On our last day, we hiked straight out of the bowl. Our path took us over a significant amount of slab rock that was pretty high up, and I am deathly afraid of heights. The hike was a fear-inducing challenge on top of what had been two weeks of continuous challenge. I hated every second of it, and because of that, I loved it. When, dry heaving, I crested the top to see our captain waiting for us and the buggies just behind the tree line, I felt a sense of pride and satisfaction deeper than anything I’d ever felt before. Moments like that, though few and far between in my life, are the closest I’ve ever gotten to happiness.
Most of the time, however, I don’t feel happy. No. Purpose and mission drive me, and when I’m successful, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction. And that’s okay with me. I’ve always been a person with that negative affect. I began seeing a therapist for depression when I was still in elementary school, and at times have felt so depressed as to have let it overshadow my entire life. It’s just who I am. Most of the time it just feels like I’m really tired; that even after 9 hours of deep sleep, I just don’t have the energy a rested person should. And so I’ve always been motivated not by the reward of happiness but by the an absolute abhorrence of failure. You could say that between the carrot and the stick, I’m more of a stick guy. But there are emotions—satisfaction after doing something I wasn’t sure I could, or the pride of overcoming a difficult obstacle, and especially, the pleasure of the discomfort of doing the hard thing itself because I know it’s making me a better person—that are, in their own way, my own personal kind of happiness. And where I’ve felt that, by orders of magnitude more than anywhere else in my life, is alone on the trails, in the mountains.
I got into endurance sports in junior high school, when I started mountain biking. Ever the child to not be satisfied with “normal” I quickly became interested in a 50 mile mountain bike race, as opposed to the shorter 12ish mile cross country races that happened on occasion in my area. Training for that 50 mile race became everything to me. At the same time, school was awful—I was getting bullied daily, and my grades were very poor—but alone on the trails, there was no one there to call me names, to tell me I was a failure, to corner me and punch me—there was only the trail in front of me, myself, and my thoughts. Already an introvert and recoiling from social contact due to that bullying, the solitude of the trails became a place of safety. Free to set my own standards, I graded myself on my effort, and when I worked hard and got a good training ride in, I could be genuinely proud of myself. And as I stuck with it, the mountain biking became proof that I could be good at something. The mountain bike community was very welcoming of me, and I quickly made friends in a way that I never could at school. The 50 mile race came and went. Mountain biking turned to road biking, and the trails of the lower Sierras were replaced with the winding roads of the upper Sierras. When I got a little older, the roads of the upper Sierras became replaced again with trails, culminating in my completion of a 50km run, in 7 hours and 15 minutes. It’s no wonder then why I felt called to wildland firefighting.
Trail running, since I first fell in love with it, has become an act of spiritual reverence. When training for an event, I would routinely spend my entire day alone, on various legs of the nearby mountains. With nothing to do but think for hours, I would work through all of my thoughts and feelings, all while putting one foot in front of the other. It would get hard, and I would get to measure myself against my own force of will. Some days I would run eagerly into the Pain Cave and emerge from it standing tall, head held high. Other days I would crumple over and find myself sitting on the side of the trail, head buried in my hands. What I’ve always loved about (ultra) trail running is that it’s allegorical for life: Alone on the trails, nobody else can do the work for you. If you’re having a bad day, and you’re still 10 miles out from the trailhead, nobody can come carry you to your car. You can either sit down and give up, or find a way to keep moving forward. It’s not about how fast you can go, but instead, about your ability to continue moving forward, no matter what happens. The successful ultra runner is the one who never gives up. Over the course of a 5 hour run, there are incredible highs, horrible lows, and everything in between; Fighting up and fighting down the trail, over mountain after mountain, trail running gives you complete ownership over everything immediate to your life. It shows you what you’re made of.
Thus, running appears at every important moment of my life. For the last three years, I’ve been struggling with chronic pain in my right hip, and after many doctor appointments, and many confused doctors, we finally came to a diagnosis of psoas impingement. Since then I’ve been working with a physical therapist, and making improvement, but it’s been slow progress. As a result of this pain, I’ve been limited in what exercise I can do, and have felt distance grow between myself and my roots as an endurance athlete. I’m following the mantra of “do what you can.” These days my runs are 5 miles long, and my lower body workouts are limited to 2 sets x 8 reps of trap bar squats (just the bar). But I still get out into the mountains whenever I can.
Last month, I went for an 8 mile run hike: When my hip felt good, and when on flat or moderately downhill grades, I would jog. The rest, I would hike. While I ran and hiked, I listened to Episode 415 with Arthur C. Brooks of the Jocko Podcast. Brooks is an author, professor, but most importantly, a happiness researcher. On the podcast, he argues that young men need four things to be happy: Hard work, ambition, “a sense of the divine,” and a partner who will stand by them and yet hold them accountable when they fall off of their path. It seemed as if Brooks took everything I had understood about my own life but had not been able to articulate, and explained it succinctly to me. Hard work and partnership are as concepts self-explanatory. Ambition is the act of having a specific goal (a purpose) to work towards that is challenging enough to legitimately warrant that hard work. A sense of the divine is a spiritual foundation to that ambition; that your goal is something bigger than yourself. It is the why to the hard work. I thought about these things as I listened. I can work hard. I’ve always had ambition in the sense that I’m never satisfied with simply being ‘okay’—I expect absolute commitment from myself in achieving my goals. And I do have a sense of the divine, though it is vague and undefined. I grew up with a very deep mistrust of organized religion, and there is a remnant part of me that is repulsed by any attempt to specifically outline one’s spiritual beliefs. Brooks, on the other hand, is devoutly Catholic, and it permeated everything about his discussion with Jocko. And as I listened to him, I wondered at my own spiritual beliefs, and how I might define them. I struggled, and failed, to put them into words. I don’t accept that. And so, motivated by the discussion between Brooks and Jocko, I’ve set out a project for myself: To be able to define, clearly, that foundation of happiness that Brooks describes: Hard work, ambition, the sense of the divine, and partnership. I have a general sense of all four, but that repulsion towards religion I still feel from childhood has prevented me from ever sitting down to define them, to understand them beyond the amorphous feelings I have of them. And now, I see that as a failure, and a weakness.
Because writing has always been the cornerstone of my own understanding, the plan is simple: To explore those four foundations of happiness in my life, to then write about them, then iteratively explore further. Hard work is the easiest for me to understand: I’ve never been satisfied with just being ‘good’ at something important to me; with the things I care about, I’m all-in. Ambition is also more clear to me: My path in EMS showed a deep sense of purpose in helping others and a passion for the physiologic underpinnings of emergency medicine. The divine is less clear: An amalgamation of Albert Camus’ interpretation of The Myth of Sisyphus, The Path as Jocko Willink describes, Stoicism, Judaism, and Absurdism. The central themes are of finding purpose through struggle, of overcoming one’s own weaknesses, and of working towards something greater than oneself. And finally, partnership is both clear and indistinct; I view romantic partnership as ‘us’ versus ‘you and I,’ and believe in the importance of aspects such as self-sacrifice in a partnership.
Perhaps I’ll post some of that writing as I come to a better understanding of those four foundations, and myself. But since understanding of oneself rarely obliges to follow a strict deadline, when, and to what extent I have writing to share on those subjects is unknowable. Finals start today with a lab practical exam, and end next week. My summer is going to be very busy, between taking Gen Chem at UC Berkeley, and tutoring Anatomy & Physiology for my current A&P professor, but I’ll have a couple weeks off between this semester and summer classes where perhaps I can dive deeper into these issues. Then again, life is always busy, and you either make time for the things that matter to you, or you they don’t matter to you.