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发表于 2011-1-8 10:27:12
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英文版:
VOX POPULI: It seems money's no guarantee of happiness
2011/01/08
Stepping out to the predawn chill to pick up the morning paper the other day, I saw two people out walking bid each other good morning, their breaths coming out in white puffs. I suddenly recalled that the kanji Chinese character for "iki" (breath) is a composite of two characters--one for "self" and the other for "the heart."
And I remembered this haiku by Hitomi Okamoto: "Winter days/ Blowing my breath/ To warm and to cool." Okamoto is so right. We blow on our fingers to warm them when they are numb from the cold, and we cool a bowl of porridge that's too hot to eat by blowing on it. This gem of a poem reminds us how life's simple pleasures can make us happy.
I think colder weather tends to make people more conscious of what it means to be happy. Apparently, one's level of happiness doesn't necessarily correspond to the size of one's income. A study in the United States concluded that people earning more than $75,000 (6.2 million yen) a year are no happier than those who earned less.
A team interviewed 450,000 subjects by phone. Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, was one of them. A noted psychologist and also recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, Kahneman concluded that a large income can "buy" satisfaction, but not happiness.
I take this to mean that people who are able to fully appreciate small blessings in their daily lives are truly happy.
One excellent example of such a person was Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831), a monk in Echigo province (present-day Niigata Prefecture). The 180th anniversary of his death fell on Thursday.
Here's one of his poems: "Bouncing a ball and playing with children in this village/ A spring day like that needn't end."
Having attained a state of pure happiness, the iconic monk is greatly loved by many people to this day.
It is said that the ranks of "Ryokan fans" tend to swell in troubled times, when people feel rushed and stressed out from all sorts of unwanted distractions. I wonder if his popularity will grow this year. He was a consummate master at finding happiness in his day-to-day existence, and I wish I could seek advice from him.
--The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 7 |
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