In Dashiell Hammet’s classic detective novel The Maltese Falcon, hard-boiled private eye Sam Spade tells a fascinating anecdote about a time he was hired to track down a man named Flitcraft.

Flitcraft was a wealthy and happily married real-estate investor with two boys, a house in the suburbs of Tacoma, and a fondness for golf. One afternoon he left his office downtown Tacoma to go for lunch when a massive beam fell from an office building 10 floors above him and crashed to the sidewalk next to him, nearly killing him. 

He never went home; his wife and kids never saw him again.

Instead, that afternoon, Flitcraft went to Seattle and from there took a boat to San Francisco. He wandered around for a few years before eventually drifting back to the Pacific Northwest, where he settled in Spokane, a mere five-hour drive from Tacoma. 

Eventually someone informed Mrs. Flitcraft that they had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband, so she hired Sam Spade to track him down. 

Here’s what Spade discovered: after returning to the Pacific Northwest, Flitcraft had gotten out of real estate and started a successful car dealership. He remarried a woman very similar to his first wife, had another son, bought a house in the suburbs of Spokane, and returned to playing golf. 

In other words, except for a few superficial details, his life was almost identical to the one he had been living before his near-death experience. At the end of the anecdote Sam Spade marvels in his stereotypically hard-boiled fashion, “I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally in the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked.”

And that’s the part of it that, personally, I’ve always disliked. I’ve always chafed at this phenomenon that now goes by the name of “hedonic adaptation” or the “hedonic treadmill” but could just as easily be called the Flitcraft Syndrome. I’ve always disliked this annoying tendency we have to “settle back naturally in the same groove” and return to the same basic level of happiness despite major positive or negative life changes.

Don’t get me wrong—I have absolutely no desire to ditch my family and go MIA without a word. None. But I’ll admit that, like Flitcraft, I do occasionally fantasize that some ill-defined yet radical upheaval in my life might just . . . make me happier. 

Who doesn’t?

But what if Dashiell Hammett is right and Flitcraft’s fate would await us all? As Spade says of Flitcraft: “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.” In other words, regardless of what the “falling beam” may be in our own lives—a seemingly negative event (like getting paralyzed) or seemingly positive (like winning the lottery)—several famous studies have shown that we have a natural tendency to return to the same level of happiness we were at prior to the major life-event.*

So if it is indeed the case that even after dramatic upheavals in life we, like Flitcraft, just “settle back naturally in the same groove,” well then . . . maybe need to try something different, something that actually works.

Rather than wanting what we haven’t got, like Flitcraft, or not wanting what we haven’t got, like Sinead O’Connor, maybe there’s a way to want what we’ve already got, like . . . like . . . Nasruddin. 

Nasruddin?

Yes, Nasruddin, the wise buffoon or holy fool from all the classic Persian wisdom tales.

Here’s Nasruddin’s technique for rekindling a genuine desire for what we already have:

Nasruddin’s method for “producing happiness” is fairly straightforward: to genuinely appreciate and derive joy from the things you take for granted—whether your “baggage” is your husband or kids, your job or home, your health or your life—all you need is a lived experience of losing them. And then recovering them again. 

It’s like that classic Joni Mitchell line: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?” Or as William Irvine writes in A Guide to the Good Life, “The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.”

But notice that, as Nasruddin points out, happiness is indeed  “produced” in this tale; it’s not something that can be consumed or sought, and it’s not something that happens by simply letting go. No, things must be taken from us. And then the things we’ve lost must be returned.  Nasruddin’s strategy is a set of very deliberate, precise, and active actions.

As is often the case, the bereft traveler’s pursuit of happiness is, ironically, the very thing that blinds him to the fact that he already possesses the means to be happy. We don’t need anything else. We just need a new relationship to what we already have. And if we can do this with simple items like luggage, then presumably all we have to do is apply the same practice in order to appreciate bigger-ticket items, just as the traveler, by the end of this tale, has the means to value both his wealth (“I have enough money to live comfortably”) and his home (which he left because there was “nothing of sufficient interest compelling [him] to stay home.”)

Yeah yeah. 

Sure sure. 

But how many of us are really willing to give up what we’ve got, even if we know damn well we’re taking it for granted? It’s just too risky, isn’t it? While Nasruddin’s method is certainly a lot less reckless and objectionable than Flitcraft’s gambit, it’s still a bit unnerving. Are you ready to go around giving up all the things in your life you take for granted just so you might be able renew your appreciation of them? And don’t forget that after Nasruddin steals the traveler’s bags, the traveler is “even more unhappy” than before. Who’s willing to put up with that, especially if we’re not even sure our “bags” are ever going to be replaced? Better the devil you know and all that stuff, right? 

Okay, then maybe what we need is a practice that will allow us to relinquish and then recover what we’re taking for granted without actually having to relinquish anything. What if our appreciation of even the simplest things in our lives can be dramatically heightened by an imaginative experience of their loss and recovery? What if we could do to ourselves what Nasruddin does to the bereft traveler, without really having to do anything at all?  As luck would have it, Anita Barrows offers us just such a practice in her haunting poem “Lessons from Darkness”: 

Now you might find the idea of contemplating the death of your loved ones, or even your beloved things, depressing or even downright morbid. But what if one way to be truly alive and live in genuine appreciation and gratitude is precisely by making it your business, every once in a while, to do exactly this?

The practice is a simple one, with deep and ancient roots in both Stoic** and Buddhist*** philosophy and, through them, in contemporary Humanistic psychology:****

Why would anyone do such a thing? 

Because it’s true, for one thing. As Paul Newman says in Hud, “No one gets out of life alive.” And because, for another, it has the power to unlock our full appreciation and love by disclosing the true poignancy and preciousness of life.

Besides, when’s the last time you erotically caressed a hawthorn tree?

* See, for example, this classic 1978 study “Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?” by a trio of researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Massachusetts: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1980-01001-001

** For instance, in one of the most controversial passages in Stoic literature, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus says, “What harm is there while you are kissing your child to say softly, ‘Tomorrow you will die;’ and likewise to your friend, ‘Tomorrow either you or I will go away, and we shall see each other no more.” (Discourses, 3.24.84-8) Similarly, in his essay “On Tranquility,” the Roman Stoic Seneca writes, “Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.” In his letter “To Marcia” Seneca also writes, “He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.” (Seneca, “To Marcia,” IX.5)

*** In Psychotherapy Without the Self, for example, Mark Epstein recounts a much-loved anecdote when the renowned meditation master Ajahn Chah was asked to explain the Buddha’s teaching, and he offered the following object-lesson: 

**** As Robert Emmons points out in his book Gratitude Works! late in his life the celebrated Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote, “It is vital that people count their blessings, to appreciate what they possess without having to undergo its actual loss. . . . One method is to imagine that someone you care about might die or will die soon. Think as vividly as you can how you would feel, what you would truly lose, and about how you would be sorry.”

References

Barrows, Anita. 2016. We are the Hunger. American Fork, Utah: Kelsay Books.

Epstein, Mark. 2008. Psychotherapy Without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.

Hammett, Dashiell. 1929. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Suresha, Ron. 2010. The Uncommon Sense of the Immortal Mullah Nasruddin: Stories, Jests, and Donkey Tales of the Beloved Persian Folk Hero. Maple Shade, New Jersey: Lethe Press.