Food, slave ships, circumstances, positivity and happiness…
“Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It’s about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.”— Rick Hanson
For this week’s post I had planned to write about food and how it is related to our attachment histories and dynamics in our adult relationships, early adverse childhood experiences and the use of food as a coping mechanism, adolescence, individuation and food, the messages that food and mealtimes can convey, which can vary from generosity, gratitude and love to control and punishment. I wrote a first draft and gathered bits of information on things like kitchen therapy, which is a new approach for exploring not only relationships with food but with the people we eat with, the kitchen providing a setting for resolving internal and interpersonal conflicts, since our dinner tables may be associated with pleasure and connection or conflict, and where the kitchen could potentially become the setting for therapy. But the first draft never evolved into something more presentable mostly because I’ve been painting this month and painting takes up a lot of time, and also, because I’ve been reading a couple of books simultaneously.
Instead, I’d like to share a couple of the things I’ve been listening and reading while engaging with painting.
First, I’d like to share a poem by Lucille Clifton, a black American poet, which I came across as I was looking at images of ships for my painting. The poem is titled “slaveship”. Clifton describes the way that the slaves were loaded into the ships, literally “like spoons.” I found a children’s book about the development of sea vessels in history that I had bought for my son when he was young and even the brief description of slavery ships in it was hard to read without flinching. It also included a diagram of how human bodies were positioned like sardines or spoons as if they were boxes or some other kind of merchandise. It is difficult to digest how the concept of human is not simply to be assumed for all humans, and that historically, many people, including women, have been denied access into this category. I remembered my own fascination with old sailing ships when I was young. For a while I became quite adept at drawing them. I also came across a slave ship metaphor while listening to a podcast, where the speaker was reflecting on how we are in some sense aboard some kind of slave ship. At some level most of humanity is not free because from early on we have been squeezed into small boxes in order to be intelligible and digestible, but we are all so much more,
slaveship
(Jesus, Angel, and Grace of God were names of ships that delivered slaves from Africa to the Americas)
loaded like spoons
into the belly of Jesus
where we lay for weeks for months
in the sweat and stink of our own
breathing
Jesus
why do you not protect us
chained to the heart of the Angel
where the prayers we never tell
are hot and red as our bloody ankles
Jesus
Angel
can these be men
who vomit us out from ships
called Jesus Angel Grace of God
onto a heathen country
Jesus
Angel
ever again
can this tongue speak
can this bone walk
Grace of God
can this sin live
I’d also like to share an article I read in Greater Good Magazine. The article, written by Jeremy Adam Smith, discusses how happiness and well-being are not always a choice and how social conditions and inequality affect our overall well-being. Smith supports a more inclusive perspective on this topic. Before I summarily present some of the ideas in the article I’d like to say, and I have tried to support this in all my posts, that a more inclusive approach of viewing issues and reality is always closer to the truth. Adopting a both // and approach is also less damaging when we evaluate and attribute reasons for people’s experience, and it is more helpful and empowering because it allows us to tap into agency and do the best we can within our contexts and circumstances.
Smith writes that outside of happiness studies, in other branches of psychology as well as fields like economics and sociology, happiness starts to look less like an individual choice and more like a product of institutional, economic, and historical forces, shaped by power differences between groups. It is interesting to consider why this blind spot exists in relation to happiness. He adds that “The answer isn’t a simple one; it begins from a place of intellectual and cultural humility, of just not knowing exactly how actions, circumstances, and genetics interact to shape our subjective well-being.”
He also feels that there’s something dishonest in minimizing the role of social forces, and that this dishonestly can be rooted in discounting the experiences of people who are hurt or marginalized by those forces. He gives examples of what structural forces might look like in society. He writes: “Slavery was a structural force, setting a stubborn pattern of social, cultural, economic, and interpersonal relationships between Black and white Americans that persists to this day. The family is a force structured by laws about marriage, divorce, taxes, reproductive health, children—and the power men have historically had over those laws. Your social network is a structure shaped by interactions with other structures: where you went to school, the work you do, your gender, your race, your religion—everything about you that connects you to others.” He also reminds us that structural forces are usually invisible to us, and most of us don’t notice the laws and institutions that shape our lives. They mostly become visible through study, concentration, and awareness.
He explains how Americans’ strong resistance to seeing structural forces, especially when it comes to how they shape individual opportunity, is a tendency with deep historical roots. He quotes the founder of American psychology, William James, in 1902, who wrote: “If you can change your mind, you can change your life”, which was empowering and healthier than focusing on pathology. In relation to the movement of positive psychology, he writes that it was revolutionary for the way it turned away from studying and treating dysfunction in individuals toward examining the practices and traits that helped people flourish. It was a move away from passivity, giving up and helplessness. He says: “In focusing on strengths, virtues, and happiness, positive psychology opened a door into human minds and relationships that science had long neglected. That was an important contribution. Unfortunately, however, this focus on the individual led many researchers and teachers to consciously reject structural explanations for individual misfortune and unhappiness, reflecting the affluent, European-American context in which their ideas grew.”
Smith concludes that the point isn’t that we should not take steps that could boost our resilience, improve our relationships and day to day levels of contentment, but rather we should not discount and underestimate the power of social forces in shaping our happiness and life satisfaction. He writes: “Acknowledging the impact of structural forces on well-being needn’t be a recipe for helplessness”
You can read the article at: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_much_control_do_you_have_over_your_own_happiness?utm_source=Greater+Good+Science+Center&utm_campaign=50b8b6564b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_GG_Newsletter_May_12_2022&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5ae73e326e-50b8b6564b-70743655