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As I’m sure you heard, 40-year old Steve Vaught spent 13 months walking the 2,800 or so miles from Oceanside, CA to New York City. He’s lost 110 pounds from his starting weight of over 400 pounds and has been served divorce papers for his trouble.

The physical feat itself makes for an interesting story – his www.fatmanwalking.com website gets over 700,000 hits a month. Lots of lessons here; after all over 31% of men are obese. One article concluded that it is almost impossible not to be obese in America.

At the same time The Week* magazine reports that over half of Americans would rather be unemployed than fat. 63% of women and 55% of men would rather be poor and slim than rich and overweight. I’m not sure these are actual choices we have to make, but that’s what the USA Today/Fitness Magazine poll says. I vote for ‘slim and rich’!

But it wasn’t until I heard Vaught interviewed on the Today show that I got the real point of the story.

Have you noticed that when someone utters a truth that silence is the only legitimate response. Truth does that – it just shuts everyone up. (Listen for those moments at your next corporate meeting. Unfortunately, they’re extremely rare!) That’s how I felt when Vaught summarized his whole adventure. “I always thought I had to lose weight in order to be happy” he said, “but I’ve discovered that I have to be happy to lose weight.”

“There it is,” I said to myself. That led me to wonder if this has universal application:

It’s not prosperity that will make you happy; it’s being happy that will lead you to prosperity.

You don’t need a soul-mate to be happy; you have to be happy to find your soul-mate. Finding your life’s purpose isn’t what leads you to happiness; it’s happiness that will lead you to your life’s purpose.

The illusive common component in this mind-game is finding happiness. Actually it seems to be illusive in life generally for the many people who still don’t understand Vaught’s insight. Two of three people who complain to their doctor about mild depression and unhappiness are immediately put on Prozac, Zoloft or something similar according to Dr. Ron Dworkin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Use of these drugs has doubled since 1998. The good doctor warns against thinking that ‘happiness is supposed to be a permanent condition, instead of a scarce, transitory, and hard-won victory in a difficult world’.

“A scarce, transitory and hard-won victory” – not much encouragement there; no wonder Dr. Dworkin is an anesthesiologist. “Just put me out so I don’t feel a thing” is exactly how many people want to deal with life. But arguing over just how happy we’re supposed to be will just make me miserable so I’m not going there. But I do want to make one last point about happiness.

Gloria Roberts is a Canadian lawyer, a skilled life-skills counselor and a dear friend. She’s also scary-smart. We were chatting about the stuff of life and she unfolded her thinking that happiness is definitely not a pursuit! But like I said, she’s a Canadian, though she lives here in Arizona, and may not have realized she’s treading on sacred ground.

Here in America people believe that the pursuit of happiness is an ‘inalienable right’ along with life and liberty. The Declaration of Independence says so and you don’t get much higher authority than that. The obvious point is that we have the right to pursue happiness but no right to happiness itself. And maybe that’s where we’re going wrong.

Maybe people are in such a frazzle in this country because they’re worn out from pursuing something that pursuing won’t give them. That’s what Steve Vaught found –pursuing happiness resulted in weighing 400 pounds. When he stopped pursuing it he lost 110 of them.

Not all of us pursue happiness by overeating. Some of us do it by going from marriage to marriage. From bottle to bottle. From addiction to addiction. From job to job; or by selling our soul to our employer thinking the sale will pay off in happiness eventually. But none of those choices will work.

Did you know the word pursuit is a derivative of the word persecution from the Anglo-French ‘purseute’?” In fact the origin of pursue is “to follow with hostile intent.” That’s why it’s not a good idea to pursue happiness. If you ever do catch up to ‘happiness’ you’ll kill it and will have to start all over again. You’re better off finding a 24 hour all-you-can-eat buffet!

The best advice comes from the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864):

Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

Stop chasing. Sit down. Be quiet and still. You will never catch up to happiness, but perhaps happiness will catch up to you.

Until next time…be purpose-full.

Ian

11558 E. Buckskin Tr., Scottsdale AZ 85255
877-502-3898 480-502-3898

Happy Lessons from Fat Man Walking