Well, a modern version of one..... this is what my dear friend and mentor Winton Higgins (on the right here) said to me at lunch last week.
We've had the ancient Greek philosophers on our minds recently because Stephen Batchelor (the world's leading Secular Buddhist bush-basher, here on the left) is in the process of publishing his next book called The Buddha, Socrates and Us.
This photo was taken last December when the three of us led an 8-day Secular Buddhist retreat together. It was the last retreat for both Stephen and Winton who retired from retreat teaching at its conclusion and we structured it around some ideas from this upcoming book.
I feel so immensely fortunate to have had these two people in my life as teachers and friends. Besides the Buddha there are four significant figures in my life when I think about my own growth, and two of them are in the picture here. (The other two for the record, are Buddhist teacher Gregory Kramer, and a university teacher, Bob Dick.)
Because both Stephen and Winton were retiring, I organised a thank you gift for them where I gathered thank-you letters from people around the world and compiled photos of those letters into photo books which I gave them as gifts.
As I wrote my own letter to Winton, who is now 82 years old, I felt sad that I don't see much of him anymore. It's a common thing in a big city like Sydney - years can go by without seeing people you love, just because they're on the other side of the bridge! You get busy with your own life, and where I live is nick-named the insular peninsula because we rarely leave it. (Driving through Sydney traffic is one of my least favourite things to do!)
So as I wrote my thank-you, I vowed to change that and we are now having a seasonal lunch together. We had our autumn lunch last week and he asked about the program I'm creating with Flourish Personal Growth.
I described to him some of the sessions I've been adding recently - walking people through the Oscar Wilde insight for example: the only thing worse than not getting what you want, is getting what you want. Looking closely at the commonly held goal of being happy all the time and the commonly followed signposts pointing us in the direction of achieving that delusional goal: money, material stuff, beauty, fame, unbounded leisure and romantic love.
Then offering a more helpful goal (flourishing) and set of signposts (the Nine Elements of Human Flourishing) with help and guidance on taking that journey.
Winton listened to me and then said, quite seriously: you're shaping up to be a modern day ancient Greek philosopher.
If someone on the street said that to me, I wouldn't think too much about it. But Winton actually knows his philosophy! Heidegger, Nietzsche, the ancient Greeks....and of course our Indian heavyweight, Siddhattha Gotama (the Buddha).
The ancient Greeks (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and others) were on about the same thing - how to live well, how to flourish, in the face of life's inescapable difficulties and challenges.
Disappointment is the gap between expectations and reality. But a successful life is rarely defined as living well or relishing life through all of its inevitable ups and downs. When I look at the 'solutions' being offered in our modern societies these days, the last phrase in that sentence is rarely included.
Life has bumpy bits, no matter what. When we leave that fact out of our vision of human flourishing, we set ourselves up for disappointment. The ancient Greeks and the Buddha nailed this. But we've forgotten. We think that if our life contains difficult spaces, we're off track somehow.
I do in fact acknowledge the ancient Greeks on my website blurb about Flourish's origins. But given that my creation is not yet out in the world, I rarely hear feedback from anyone about it. I get an occasional response to my blog post emails - they're always appreciative but they're quite rare. The only piece of encouraging feedback I see is my little page of statistics that shows over half of my email recipients open my emails (a stellar 'open rate' apparently.)
So Winton's comment really landed meaningfully for me. And it made me think I should start sharing some more about what's coming with the program. My goal is to launch it by the time I do my TEDx talk in October, so between now and then I'll share some more with you.
In a nutshell, we (humans) collectively know what it takes to flourish. It's not a mystery. Yet so few people are familiar with the recipe and so it's no surprise that mental health disorders are on the march.
This is crazy!! And my mission for the remainder of my productive days, is to make that knowledge, and the tools to achieve it, readily available to everyone.
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