We go through life as if we are on a forced march. What if we went through doing better than trying to make it through another day? Psychology often was content in pointing out our flaws but not helpful in learning to combat them. The dean of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, has a new book in the library called Flourish. I was surprised to read that some of his techniques are being taught to citizens serving in our armed forces. Our perspective does have an impact on how we approach life's joys and down times, major and small choices in our families or at war.

 

He moves from happiness to a sense of well-being in this book. A set of pillars for the approach is termed PERMA, for positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Instead of overpraising or overly criticizing anything produced, we can point toward its strengths and chisel away at the weakness. I remember shaking my head at our children's writing teachers filling a page with red marks but not giving them a sense of what good writing looked liked, so they started to see writing as doomed to failure.

To help influence positive emotion, he prescribes doing positive things. He speaks of random acts of kindness. One day, fuming in a long post office line to get penny stamps, he decided to change course. He bought ten sheets for ten dollars and announced who needs penny stamps, they're free. It had been a while since he saw so many smiles and felt as good as those few minutes in the post office. He is quick to point out that well-being is deeper than feeling happy, especially because many people are not as basically cheerful as their normal baseline as others. He is not a Pollyanna, but he does believe that we all have resources to help us meet the peaks and valleys of life.

 

In a noteworthy section, he demonstrates that we have a long way to go in treating depression. Following other cognitive work such as David Burns in Feeling Good, Seligman asserts that depressives need to look at how they structure their experiences. They tend to beat themselves up for failures and underestimate achievements. To help counter this, a simple gratitude list of positive experiences during the day can restore some psychological balance.

 

As a pastor, I am struck by how the basic outline of religious behavior toward others under the rubric of love: respect, kindness become part of his scheme for well-being.In other words, he is promoting an embodied spirituality. One could construct a similar book based on the gifts or fruit of the Spirit (Is. 11, Gal. 5). One of the signal contributions of religion is its function to help provide meaning in this life. As the catechism said we are here "to know God and enjoy God's benefits." Meaning in work is vocation, not a job. Our task, as Buechner said, is to find the place where the needs of the world meet our skills and best joys.

 

One can take the Signature Strengths inventory at www.authentichappiness.com. Positive psychology can be easily criticized for downplaying the problems, individual and social, that we all face. I would reply that its methods permits us to face problems and address them, rather than denying them. Instead of decrying being powerless, we can envision engaging our individual and collective power to face up to the challenges of our time. With wagon trains, ordinary faced the American frontier. Still in the grips of the depression, we faced down Hitler and Tojo. The manned American space program is but fifty years old. The constant drone of what we cannot do creates a collective sense of hunkering down instead of what lies ahead. The country that built a rail line across a continent can face issues and crises, real or ginned-up bumper stickers.