Food for Thought: What makes us happy?

Dear all,

Firstly, thank you for Thursday’s Celebration of Pedagogy. It was an excellent snapshot of the fantastic activities and ideas that you are sharing with your students. I hope that you found it useful and that it enabled you to think about additional ideas for your own classroom.

This week’s Food for Thought is focused on the word happiness. We are about to break for the winter vacation and will be wishing each other, our friends and families a Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year. It sounds wonderful but what is happiness? What does it mean to be happy? How do we achieve happiness? Researching this topic, along with positivism, it becomes clear that happiness which we all seek and wish for, is far more difficult to attain than one might at first imagine. Hence the question, how happy are you and what are you doing about being happier in your life?

These two TED’s will not provide an absolute answer to these questions but they might make you think and have an impact on your new year resolution.

#1 When are humans most happy? To gather data on this question, Matt Killingsworth built an app, Track Your Happiness, that let people report their feelings in real time. Among the surprising results: We're often happiest when we're lost in the moment. And the flip side: The more our mind wanders, the less happy we can be. (Filmed at TEDxCambridge.)

#2 What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Buddhist monk, photographer and author Matthieu Ricard has devoted his life to these questions, and his answer is influenced by his faith as well as by his scientific turn of mind: We can train our minds in habits of happiness. Interwoven with his talk are stunning photographs of the Himalayas and of his spiritual community.

Thank you for all your hard work that has contributed towards a wonderful semester.

Wishing you a Happy Christmas and a Happy and Healthy New Year,

Yours

Adrian

Before I sign off for 2014 I’d just like to share this very short video that could be used in any class as a provocation for discussing privilege and opportunity.