Have you felt that satisfaction, as Mick Jagger has explained, is difficult to acquire? In fact, immediate satisfaction is easy, and we’re all relatively good at acquiring it, contrary to the singer’s complaint. Staying satisfied is difficult, and anxiety over filling our insatiable desires is what makes it so. You don’t have to take my word for it; Old Sid –Siddhartha, also known as the Buddha—told people that 2,500 years ago. Nevertheless, as I say “anxiety over filling our insatiable desires,” I can hear the psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors, and neuroscientists, and neurologists objecting to my simplification.
Maybe they have a point, but maintaining satisfaction is akin to what happens after perfume or hot-bread molecules waft in a Brownian movement toward olfactory neurons. The first collisions between molecules and neurons send intense signals to the brain. Then the experience of aroma fades with continued immersion in those molecules. Seems that the brain just gets fatigued trying to maintain interest in a particular smell after just a few minutes.
You achieve, and then you fail or succumb to a setback or to the mere fatigue of success. It’s something the Buddha warned us about: Desire is the cheat. Success breeds anxiety over its potential discontinuation or future unfulfillment. Winning a championship is invariably followed by “What’s next?”
Is there any way around the ennui and disappointment that ensues success? Sure, find another spiral stair; head toward the top of another cone. It won’t be the same, of course. Once one gets to the championship, the season is over. And going for the next championship the following season isn’t really a continuation because the parameters change.
However, in our lives outside any arena, we just don’t go from season to season seeking the same kind of championship without becoming bored that all we are doing is “more of the same.” Why? The process of achieving is the focus in anticipation of success. Anticipation stretches time and increases intensity. As children on the way to an amusement park express: “When are we going to be there?” And all of us in receiving that first freshly baked bread molecule seem, in anticipation, to be driven in the direction of that bakery.
And that’s why those who push themselves toward every new success might see as lazy those who don’t. The tireless are worthy of more emulation than the tired. For the olfactory sense, the next smell is the next intense moment.
Take a lesson from your nose. If you notice, it leads the way as you walk from bakery to candle store to flower shop and beyond. You are finite, but you live in a world with an indefinite number of potential successes. This isn’t mere figurative speech. Apparently, we have not only a nose for success, but also a nose for a trillion smells, as Leslie Vosshall of Rockefeller University in NYC seems to have demonstrated.* The number is significant not because it is so large, but because it bespeaks of everyone’s potential.
Follow your nose. As long as you can breathe, you can experience if not a trillion then at least an indefinite number of successes. Mick Jagger was wrong. You can get many satisfactions.
*Williams, Sarah C. P., Human nose can detect a trillion smells. Science. Mar. 20, 2014. Accessed December 2, 2018. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/human-nose-can-detect-trillion-smells
Maybe they have a point, but maintaining satisfaction is akin to what happens after perfume or hot-bread molecules waft in a Brownian movement toward olfactory neurons. The first collisions between molecules and neurons send intense signals to the brain. Then the experience of aroma fades with continued immersion in those molecules. Seems that the brain just gets fatigued trying to maintain interest in a particular smell after just a few minutes.
You achieve, and then you fail or succumb to a setback or to the mere fatigue of success. It’s something the Buddha warned us about: Desire is the cheat. Success breeds anxiety over its potential discontinuation or future unfulfillment. Winning a championship is invariably followed by “What’s next?”
Is there any way around the ennui and disappointment that ensues success? Sure, find another spiral stair; head toward the top of another cone. It won’t be the same, of course. Once one gets to the championship, the season is over. And going for the next championship the following season isn’t really a continuation because the parameters change.
However, in our lives outside any arena, we just don’t go from season to season seeking the same kind of championship without becoming bored that all we are doing is “more of the same.” Why? The process of achieving is the focus in anticipation of success. Anticipation stretches time and increases intensity. As children on the way to an amusement park express: “When are we going to be there?” And all of us in receiving that first freshly baked bread molecule seem, in anticipation, to be driven in the direction of that bakery.
And that’s why those who push themselves toward every new success might see as lazy those who don’t. The tireless are worthy of more emulation than the tired. For the olfactory sense, the next smell is the next intense moment.
Take a lesson from your nose. If you notice, it leads the way as you walk from bakery to candle store to flower shop and beyond. You are finite, but you live in a world with an indefinite number of potential successes. This isn’t mere figurative speech. Apparently, we have not only a nose for success, but also a nose for a trillion smells, as Leslie Vosshall of Rockefeller University in NYC seems to have demonstrated.* The number is significant not because it is so large, but because it bespeaks of everyone’s potential.
Follow your nose. As long as you can breathe, you can experience if not a trillion then at least an indefinite number of successes. Mick Jagger was wrong. You can get many satisfactions.
*Williams, Sarah C. P., Human nose can detect a trillion smells. Science. Mar. 20, 2014. Accessed December 2, 2018. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/human-nose-can-detect-trillion-smells
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