Carpe Diem by Roman Krznaric

Author:Roman Krznaric
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-03T10:02:03+00:00

THE LOST VARIETIES OF NOW

Exuberance: Unleashing a Lust for Life

Who can forget the opening of The Sound of Music? Even if you find the film sentimental and saccharine, you can probably recall Maria, the postulant nun, swirling with exuberant delight in the Austrian Alps, singing her heart out about the hills being alive with the sound of music. Lost in song, she eventually hears the distant ringing of convent bells and rushes back late for mass. Her superiors are not amused, and she is hauled in for an audience before the boss, the Reverend Mother. Maria explains how she just couldn’t help climbing up the Untersberg, lured by the fragrant green slopes and blue sky, singing as she went.

What’s Maria’s problem—at least from the perspective of the nuns? It’s her natural and almost uncontrollable exuberance. Rather than adhering to the convent rules and immersing herself in a mindful state of Christian prayer, she is bursting with energy and excitement, and can’t help losing herself in the moment, in the beauty of the mountains, the sky, the birds, in life and laughter. Maria’s joie de vivre gives her an extraordinary capacity for being in the now, but it’s a version of being present that is very different from the poised calm of mindful breathing or a composed and contemplative session of what is known as “walking meditation.”

What, exactly, is exuberance? According to clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, “exuberance is an abounding, ebullient, effervescent emotion . . . Certainly it is no lulling sense of contentment: exuberance leaps, bubbles, and overflows.”41 It is an aliveness and passion for life that is more energetic than joy but less intense than ecstasy. The exuberant among us are the embodiment of enthusiasm, in the original Greek sense of en theos (“having a god within”). Not that this is always a good thing, notes Jamison. If everyone was continually exuberant all of the time, “the world would be an exhausting and chaotic place, driven to incoherence by competing enthusiasms.”42 You can’t have too many Marias on the scene.

For Jamison, exuberant individuals represent a particular personality type, making up an estimated 6 to 10 percent of the general population.43 It’s a mostly innate trait or disposition, closely related to extroversion (and in some cases bipolar disorder). You can’t take a course in exuberance as you can with mindfulness: either you’ve got it or you haven’t. She cites many character examples, from the naturalist John Muir to the physicist Richard Feynman, from Toad of Toad Hall to Snoopy. One of her favorites is US president Theodore Roosevelt. He had an irrepressible zest for life and was always speaking with great animation, bursting into roars of laughter every five minutes. He could often be found racing around the White House with his children, chasing them and their ponies up and down the marble stairs. “You must always remember,” said one British diplomat, “the President is about six.”44 Like Maria von Trapp, Roosevelt had a carpe diem lust for life, a capacity to squeeze everything he could out of each moment.

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