Editorial

Letter from Larksong     

 Today, March 2, I saw the first robin. I know one robin doesn’t make a spring, and he’s not in the dooryard yet, but at least having one in the neighborhood helps. Also, buckets are hanging on spiles in maple trees, another sure sign that spring is in the air. I don’t have to belabor the long and snowy winter, but I can’t recall a more overcast and snow-filled February. The month seemed forever. As a rule, February is a cold but sun-filled month. Temperatures may drop to the low teens at night and by noon icicles are dripping, snow is melting, and rivulets of water flowing down the ditches. Not this year. There would be some snowmelt and then another storm moved in overnight refilling the opened paths. Any illusions we had that spring is near vanished. We sat by the fire reading and eating popcorn and listened to the rumble of the snowplow as Don worked most of the night so that the milk trucks could get through in the morning. Those guys deserve our thanks for their strenuous and yet skillful work in the midst of swirling and blowing snow. In spite of near zero visibility at times, Don missed our mailbox every time. Generally, February winds tend to be calm. Depending on a wind pump for water all of our farming years, I became a close observer of wind patterns. Sometimes in February there would be three consecutive days of calm and then a weather front would approach, winds would rise, and water was pumped. The same patterns appear in August. Two years ago in August there were 12 straight days of no wind. Since the two months are the same distance from the solstice (winter and summer) I wonder whether it has to do with the spin of the earth? Sort of the Midwestern version of the doldrums. One of these days the sun will shine, the thermometer will reach 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and we will have Mud Season, that period we endure before full spring arrives. The massive snow piles and their slow melting rate promise a prolonged Mud Season, which will be graciously endured because of what follows—spring peepers, skunk cabbage, hepatica, plowing, pasture, animals on grass, dandelions, and robins in the yard. No matter how many false starts March has, or how cruelly the month treats us, we just can’t stop loving spring. Perhaps it is as Yogi Berra said about baseball, “Ninety-five percent is half mental.” Recently I read where a group, let’s call them positive psychologists, began to study happy people rather than the mentally ill. These psychologists had doubts that the observations made about neurotics were applicable to the rest of us. What the positive psychologists learned was that, while getting a new phone or a new car or a new high-end home did give us a burst of pleasure, the pleasure did not last. If we wanted to continue to feel the same spike of happiness, we soon needed another fix—yet another phone, yet another car, more stuff. They called that mode of pleasure-seeking the “hedonic treadmill.” This is what got my attention—the happiest people, the shrinks discovered, did not live their lives on this perpetual treadmill. Rather, these folks had raised their baseline mood in ways that did not require repeated doses of new stuff. The people most satisfied with life, it turned out, had strong social connections, found meaning in their work, got to exercise what they considered to be their highest talents, and had a sense of some higher purpose. The positive psychologists confirmed scientifically, in other words, what we simple-living folks have been advocating all along: a life lived with less emphasis on acquisition has the effect of leaving more time for richer, more meaningful, less resource-intensive life rewards, making the people happier. In 1862 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about his friend Henry Thoreau, “He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself.” Most of us probably don’t want to live like Thoreau did, but sad-eyed Henry knew how to simplify and not step onto the hedonic treadmill.

DK