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I was watching Oprah the day she interviewed Tom Cruise about his engagement to Katie
Holmes. His exuberance was wonderful to watch. Myself and now my son
are very expressive when it comes to being exuberant. Unfortunately
like Tom Cruise that behavior seems to be criticized? How weird and
what I shame that in the days that followed Tom would be so harshly
criticized for displaying his joy. It's OK for other actors to fall off
Oprah's chair onto the floor and "sob" like Will Smith recently did
showing how he felt when Obama won. Or the antics of Jim Carrey, who will fall all over the place in his slap-stick way.
Today
I was thinking of how joy/exuberance can and will help in today's world
and the coming years. So here I am looking around the web, for what I
can share and learn. I came upon these links and the items about TR,
John Muir are of interest to me, also about how scientists and
researchers who still have that exuberance.
Below are some excerpts...enjoy...
https://www.mcmanweb.com/exuberance.html
excerpt:
Dr
Jamison was reading from a draft of a book she was working on at the
time, just out this week. The book is called "Exuberance: The Passion
for Life," a long-overdue look at the positive life force that resides
in all of us, the antidote to her previous "Night Falls Fast" on
suicide. If "Night Falls Fast" constitutes the lugubrious march to the
cemetery in New Orleans funeral processions, "Exuberance" is the joyous
homeward journey, when the monotonous drone of the dirge gives way to
life-affirming jazz in all its polyphonic glory. Together, these two
works represent the equivalent of a treasured boxed set into human
nature, a masterpiece of scholarship, insight, and literary elegance.
Dr
Jamison’s book starts out with Teddy Roosevelt, the youngest US
President, whose life, according to a friend, was the "unpacking of
endless Christmas stockings." Said Kipling, after a meeting: "I curled
up on the seat opposite and listened and wondered until the universe
seemed to be spinning around and Theodore was the spinner." (See also TR and John Muir.)
In
her Johns Hopkins talk, Dr Jamison described TR as "hypomanic on a mild
day," an observation that did not make it into her book. Rather, she
sees exuberance as a temperament, equivalent to enthusiasm which in
Greek means a god within. "Happy is he who bears a god within," she
quotes Louis Pasteur, "and obeys it." But our species, she reminds us,
is well-served by a variety of temperaments. "The joyous, and not so,"
she points out, "need one another in order to survive."
In
our phone interview, Dr Jamison stressed that exuberance comes in
degrees. The people in her book tend to experience it in supersized
dimensions, but even those who are depressed can catch it like a
contagion. "Joy infects," she writes. "Expressive individuals strongly influence the moods of those who are unexpressive.
Kay Jamison’s Heroes
Dr Jamison told this writer
that scientists, contrary to public perception, are enormously
inventive and creative. Her list includes Snowflake Bentley (who wrote
of the beloved snow crystals he photographed, "was life history written
in more dainty or fairy-like hieroglyphics?), Michael Faraday (who
pioneered electricity and commented, "nothing is too wonderful to be
true"), the physicist Richard Feynman ("the ultimate scientific
galumpher" whose work was play to him), and James Watson (co-discoverer
of the DNA double helix, who, "in pursuit of an idea is an unnerving
mix of exuberant intuition and deadly logic").
A case study of scientific
exuberance in action is Robert Farquhar, of Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics Laboratory, and mission director of the Near Earth Asteroid
Rendevous spacecraft, which in 2001 successfully landed on the asteroid
Eros. "I can’t understand why they pay me to do what I love," he told
Dr Jamison. His enthusiasm gave him the staying power to persevere over
the NASA bureaucrats, who would have been satisfied with a mere orbital
mission. His colleague, Andrew Chen told Dr Jamison that exuberance
endows one with the resiliency to handle inevitable rejections and
bounce back, though he confessed it can also scatter one’s focus.
In an article in Science, Dr Chen wrote:
"Watching that event was
the most exciting experience of my life. I was asked immediately
afterwards how I felt, and I mumbled something about being tired and
happy, but I missed the point. I realized afterward what I should have
said: it was like watching Michael Jordan on the basketball court, when
the game is on the line and he is in the groove. One miracle after
another unfolds, and we are left stunned and speechless. When we
learned that the spacecraft had not only landed on the surface, but was
still operational, we hardly knew what to think."
Following the Eros project,
Dr Chen confessed to a kind of postpartum depression, at a loss for
something new to throw himself into, but even as he made this admission
he began waxing eloquent to Dr Jamison over geological anomalies on the
asteroid’s surface ("I’m beginning to get intrigued.") and over "this airplane-to-Mars thing."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
https://www.lorenhardin.com/2006/02/exuberance-incapable-of-being.html
Kay Redfield Jamison in her book, “Exuberance: The Passion for Life”,
exquisitely captures the nature of exuberance: “Exuberance is an
abounding, ebullient, effervescent emotion…Exuberance leaps, bubbles,
and overflows, propels its energy through troop and tribe……it is the
infectious energies of exuberance that proclaim and disperse much of
what is marvelous in life…and if we ourselves are not so exuberant we
will, caught up in the contagious joy of those who are, be inclined
collectively to go yonder…Exuberant people take in the world and act
upon it differently…they hold their ideas with passion and delight, and
they act upon them with dispatch. Their love of life and of adventure
is palpable…”
A
journalist wrote of President Roosevelt, “You go into Roosevelt’s
presence…and you go home and wring the personality out of your
clothes.” Steven’s mother, Virgie said of Steven, “When he walked into
a room it was transferred to you…you felt the love.” When one of God’s
exuberant ones is “called home”, it leaves a great void. Therefore I
can understand why his father, Mark, admitted, “It’s sure hard to get
over it!” I replied, “Surely you don’t think you’re supposed to do
you?”
Exuberant
people are filled with joy and enthusiasm and are incapable of being
indifferent. Louis Pasteur, the scientist and inventor, wrote, “The
Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of
things…they bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our
language…the word ‘enthusiasm’…en theos…’a god within’…Happy is he who
bears a god within, and who obeys it.”
Steven had ‘a god within’ and he obeyed Him. The question before us is, “Do we?”, and,” Will we?”
“I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”
(2 Timothy 4:7, one of Steven’s favorite Bible passages)
This is part one of a seven part series. Read parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
https://www.mcmanweb.com/tr_muir.html
"We do not intend our natural resources to be exploited by the few against the interests of the many."
Believe it or not, a
Republican President said that, Theodore Roosevelt. TR was not your
average President. According to Kay Jamison, who needs no introduction,
speaking to the 2002 Depression and Related Affective Disorders (DRADA)
Conference, Teddy Roosevelt was "hypomanic on a mild day." He suffered
from depression, and mental illness ran in the family, including a
brother who had to be institutionalized and a son who committed
suicide. He wrote 40 books, and read a book a day, even as President.
In 1903, TR teamed up with
fellow exuberant, John Muir, for an extended hiking trip in Yosemite.
Nature was Muir’s deliverance from his strict Scottish immigrant
upbringing. Someone described his writings as the "journal of a soul on
fire." He literally spoke in tongues to wildflowers, and his constant
stream of letters to lawmakers ultimately attracted the attention of
the twenty-sixth President of the US. "Any fool could destroy trees,"
Muir wrote. "They can’t run away." Muir saw God’s immanence everywhere
in nature, particularly in the mighty sequoias. "Unfortunately, "God
cannot save trees from fools," he observed. "Only the government can do
that."
TR was a committed
conservationist long before he met John Muir, but after the Yosemite
trip he marshaled his exuberance with new urgency. When TR assumed
office in 1901, half of the nation’s timberlands had been cut down, the
buffalo and other species faced extinction, and special interests were
teaming up to lay waste to huge tracts of pristine wilderness. Thanks
to TR, five national parks were created, along with 150 national
forests, 51 bird refuges, four national game preserves, 18 national
monuments (including the Grand Canyon which later became a national
park), 24 reclamation projects, and the National Forest Service.
Significantly, TR extended the concept of democracy to include future
citizens, arguing that it was undemocratic to exploit the nation’s
resources for present profit. "The greatest good for the greatest
number," he wrote, "applies to the number within the womb of time."
In 1912, a would-be
assassin shot TR in the chest. Faced with the prospect of premature
death, he remarked, "No man has had a happier life than I have led; a
happier life in every way." The deaths of his first wife and mother on
the same day followed by a grieving period that lasted two years
seemingly belies that statement, but personal realization has long been
recognized as the reconciliation of opposites, and the same applies to
John Muir, as well, who wrote he only went out for a walk but stayed
out till sunset, for "going out was coming in."
