What really matters?

A good friend recently lent me the book "The Art of Happiness," a series of interviews and excerpts from speeches by the Dalai Lama. I haven't finished it yet, not even a half an inch through it, but something that I found meaningful for me in the first hundred pages was a very clear distinction that The Dalai Lama makes between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure, he articulates, comes from attainment of the perfect body, possessions, and soul mates of our dreams, the gratifying albeit fleeting satisfaction that we get them all. Happiness is the lasting satisfaction that comes from a cultivated compassion for every other human being, the satisfaction that comes from finding intimacy in every encounter, and every relationship we may find ourselves in. Intimacy of course, as is defined in the book, is whenever any two beings come into bodily contact, not our western view that intimacy must be an erotic encounter between lovers. While reading this explanation for the distinction between pleasure and happiness, I began to think about the wide chasm of difference between my native culture and the one that I have come to embrace here. Anyone who has the chance to spend a couple weeks living among Filipino people would most likely attest to the fact that people here, although living lives devoid of the 'pleasure' we have in America, are much 'happier' than persons in our corner of the world. Filipinos are much more tactile people, always touching your leg or rubbing your stomach or arm while they talk to you. Oftentimes, I'll be sitting with a group of middle-aged men, drinking tuba (coconut wine) and eating little bits of squid and raw fish, and one of the guys will turn to me and start talking about something or other, whether I understand him or not, and he'll put his hand on my thigh the whole time while he tells me some local joke or story, and laughs a hearty laugh. Now just think about what would happen if that kind of intimacy occurred in the states, if some guy at a bar put his hand on another guy's thigh while he joked with him and talked about a football game. It's been one of the weird things to get used to here, and although I've been uncomfortable at times, I see this affection, this tactile nature, as one of the things that makes these people so happy despite their need for so many material possessions that we take for granted. Of course it's not just their aptitude for touching each other's thighs that make Filipinos happy, but this is just one facet of the culture of unconditional affection, compassion, for each other, that I've come to appreciate. This culture of affection can be infuriating when you wish to hold people accountable for wrongdoing, when you wish to confront someone who has gone against the grain, stolen goods, not done their duty cleaning seaweed, stolen your precious tomatoes from Virginia, but at the same time, this nurturing, amiable culture creates a higher level of happiness among people. There are definitely many things that this culture could learn from ours, indoor plumbing, road right-of-way laws, traffic enforcement, basic sanitation, natural resource management, but I think many of these pale in comparison to what we stand to learn from the culture here: Happiness.