Author: Mark Hannam

It is August and we are driving to Heathrow.  In less than an hour, you will depart through the security gate – with three other young people – heading for Manzini in Swaziland, via Addis Ababa and Johannesburg. You will be gone for year, although we will come and visit you in eight months.  In the last eighteen years we have never been apart for more than two weeks.  I am going to miss you greatly, but I do not want to tell you this.

For, this is your day: the culmination of a year of dreaming, planning, fund-raising, waiting and waiting and more waiting, with a growing sense of anticipation.  It is a big adventure, a rite of passage, a declaration of independence, a crossing of the threshold from adolescence into adulthood.   It is your day, not mine.  At the airport I buy £50 worth of Rand, so you have some brass in pocket when you land.  In your bag you have a letter that I have written to you, which you read – I later discover – while the plane taxis out to the runway to take-off.  It tells you how proud I am of you, and that I think about you every day.

The day after you depart is one of mixed emotion for me.  I know that without my support and encouragement it would have been difficult for you to spend a year away in Africa.  I worry about the increased risks you face in an environment very different to Hackney.  You are street-wise, but where you are going the streets are different.  And, don’t forget, because I told you several times, the number and severity of traffic accidents is one of the biggest differences.   Yet, for all that, I know that this is what you want to do, and I admire your courage and your commitment.  You will have a great time and you will do some good in this world.  For that I cannot but be happy.

Those difficult early-teenage years are now behind us.  At sixteen, after under-performing in you GCSE exams, you changed schools and started again.  You made some new friends, worked harder, applied successfully to the University of Manchester, deferring your place for a year to allow you to volunteer at a project in Southern Africa that looks after children who are orphaned, abandoned, or simply in need of care.  You had (mostly) stopped picking pointless fights with me and I had (mostly) stopped imposing pointless rules on you.

Our relationship was not without its frustrations: there were still irritations and misunderstandings on both sides.   You wanted to grab more freedom and I wanted you to show greater responsibility.  But we kept talking to each other, kept cooking and eating together, kept faith in each other.  Most importantly of all, we were able to joke together.  We maintained a common bond in the humour of the absurd, of the bizarre, of the eccentric.  We had progressed from Harpo Marx in A Night at the Opera, via Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, to Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf on Wall Street.  We laughed at them all, and we laughed together.

I have a vivid memory of when you were very young, maybe only a year old.  I had taken you out of the bath and you were wrapped in a big towel, slowly being dried and rubbed with oil and cream, before being dressed in a sleep-suit and put to bed.  I wished that I could sing in tune, even just a little.  I would have sung you a lullaby: Summertime, and the livin’ is easy / Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high / Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-looking / So hush, little baby, don’t you cry.  But I knew well the strict limitations of my vocal skills: I’d better stick to pulling funny faces at you instead.

We play a game.  I make a series of actions, touching my ears, my eyes, my nose, my lips, my chin and the top of my head.  I try to get you to copy me.  I repeat the series in the same order several times.  Then I make a deliberate mistake and touch my chin when I should have touched my nose.  I pull a face, roll my eyes, shrug my shoulders and look forlorn.  Then I try again. I repeat the series correctly three times and then make the same deliberate mistake again.   You giggle.  You smile at me.  You seem to find my clowning funny.  You have been waiting and watching for the error.  I can’t sing but I can make you laugh, and that’s good enough for me.

Then you try to copy me.  You touch your ear, your nose, your lips, the top of your head.  You repeat the series.  Then the third time, you go wrong and touch your chin.  You look puzzled.  For a split second I’m not quite sure what has happened: have you lost the thread of your actions, and forgotten the pattern?  Were you not able to remember the sequence for a third time?   Before I could organize this thought in my mind, you shrugged your shoulders and burst out laughing.  And how you laughed: peals of uninhibited, uncontrolled hilarity.  Pure physical delight.

The human animal: a thinker, a talker, a maker of tools, but most importantly, a laugher.  And I want to laugh with you, but I am in shock because I realize that you have not only copied my action series, you have also copied my deliberate mistake.  Crazy girl!  You are already asserting your equal standing in our relationship: anything you can do I can do too.   I laugh – we laugh together – but I also want to cry with joy that we have shared this moment of mimicry and intimacy, that I made you laugh, and you repaid me by making me laugh too.

Last month you came to visit me on my birthday.  I cooked for you.  This is more challenging than it once was, because of your commitment to veganism.  You know that I am sceptical of your rationale, but respectful of your decision.  And I am glad that it has made you more interested, both in cooking and in the politics of food.  I make us a selection of dishes, all with a Middle-Eastern theme, and they mostly work out.  We eat well, and I drink well too.  Later we drop into a pub in Holborn to watch England play rugby.  You queue to buy me beer and we enjoy the game together.   Then we head to Covent Garden: you have bought two tickets for us to see an evening of contemporary dance as part of my birthday present (along with a small succulent, an essential addition to my new flat in E2).  The performance is good, with striking music, simple but effective set design and exciting modern choreography.  We had a great day together and I will remember it for a long time.

You are now in your early twenties and we are starting to make friends.  It is not always easy.  Converting a relationship between parent and child into a relationship between two adults requires us both to reconsider our roles, our power to hurt, our knowledge of each other’s weaknesses, our propensity to slip into standard or stereotypical roles.  You will always be my daughter, but I do not want you to be only my daughter: I also want you to be my friend.

I remember someone asking me, when you were around ten or eleven, did I mind that my only child was a girl?  I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this question.  I didn’t think that I would have treated a son any differently from the way I treated you.  I have sometimes wished that you were more tidy, more timely, more Tottenham; but I have never wished that you were a boy.  My only regret, less for me than for you, which I have become aware of in writing these texts about you, is that you will never know first-hand what it feels like to be a father to a daughter.  For me it has been the best experience.

 

It was a warm night in June, or perhaps July.  I was very conscious of the time, because you were late.  We had asked you to come home by a certain time, but your curfew-hour had passed, and you were still out.  I left the house and walked around aimlessly, for fifteen to twenty minutes, up and down the local streets.   I knew that the chances of meeting you were low; negligible; greater than zero, but not by much.  What else could I do?  Sitting at home waiting for you was a torment.  By walking, at least I could slowly impose upon myself a diminution of my anger.   I would almost certainly not find you, but I would be kinder to you when you eventually came home from wherever you had been hiding.

You had a phone; a very nice phone; a BlackBerry to be precise.  In those days, when Nokia and Erikson had fallen behind, and before Apple and Samsung were ubiquitous, BlackBerry was the phone of choice for teenage girls in Hackney.  Forget the efficiency with which they delivered email, which made them beloved of employees of the financial services industry, for you it was only about the free-to-use messaging service:  BlackBerry Messenger allowed you and your friends to communicate endlessly and pointlessly – securely too, although you cared less about that – without incurring any cost.

Tonight, my smart daughter had her smart phone turned-off.  Or you were just ignoring my messages, pretending that, despite being a member of the most “connected” generation in history, somehow you were unavailable to take my call, enquiring why you were not home at the agreed time.  You were on the grid but pretending not to be.

You were late, very late, and I was furious.  This was not the first time: it felt as if it was every time.  You asked if you could go out and we agreed a time by which you must be home.  You invariably came home an hour or more later than we had agreed and then played hurt and aggrieved when we chided you for tardiness.  You were at fault, but your body language quickly made us feel ourselves to be the problem: frowning mouth, eyes rolling upwards, tension in your shoulders and fists.

One of my worst experiences of fatherhood was catching myself while offering you some form of admonition or cautionary advice, realising half way through that I was starting to sound exactly like my parents addressing me when I was your age.  And I remembered – immediately and urgently – how little regard I had for what they said to me when I was in your shoes.  I didn’t want to repeat that mistake but, mid-sentence it was hard to re-phrase my nugget of parental guidance in a way that might be of some beneficial use to you.

The repetition of fool’s wisdom, from one generation to the next – and the next and the next, onwards unto perpetuity – was not my idea of responsible parenting.  Just stop talking, I told myself, before you say something even more stupid.

When I was a teenager, I thought school uniform was an authoritarian imposition, and wholly pointless; I thought it not unreasonable that I should go out with my friends without being obliged to return home at some arbitrarily agreed hour; and I thought that the formal rituals of family life – eating together, taking an interest in the day-to-day worries of kith and kin, showing respect to each other’s values and property – were insubstantial and should be subordinated to the genuine demands of peer friendship.   Mostly, I still think these things.

How I struggled to make the case for the other side of those arguments, when you told me, with exasperation, exactly what I had tried to explain to my parents a generation previously.  I could have said, “yes, of course, you are right”, but I doubted that it would be helpful for you, as you matured into adulthood, and was certain that it would not be helpful for me, as I clung on, reluctantly, to my paternal role as enforcer of household law.

Looking back, I realise that there is a modicum of truth in the wisdom of parents.  There is virtue in shared daily routines, of demonstrating solidarity with the joys and tears of other family members, in learning to be diplomatic, in respecting agreements and trying to meet expectations that have been collective agreed.  An important part of growing up is learning how to modulate the desire for sincerity – for authenticity, as we existentialists like to say – with the social value of compromise and peace.  Some things, albeit true, do not need to be said; some hypocrisies do not need to be called out; some family traditions, rules, mores, do not need to be transgressed, just for the sake of demonstrating the ego’s autonomy.

That said, an equally important part of growing up is knowing when civility is demeaning, when home-truths demand to be told, when double-standards exposed, when tradition should be abandoned and when innovation embraced.  I am even now learning how best to judge the appropriateness of these actions; back then I found myself trying to teach you what I had yet to master.  Parenting is error-strewn; learning by doing badly; being unable to find the right balance; laying paving in the wrong direction but with good intentions.

What did you need from me during those difficult teenage years – from fourteen to seventeen – when you felt the need to rebel against me and my values, to challenge my authority, to overturn the order of the home, just as I had felt that need when I was your age?  But – I wanted to say to you – but don’t you see that the order I have imposed is reasonable?  I have not established my authority upon unjustified and unaccountable power.  I am not an unthinking dictator.  Each request I make, each limit I set, each boundary I draw for you is based on a thoughtful and sincere assessment of your right to independence, blended with our right for the integrity of our family life to be respected.

Of course, you needed to rebel.  When you are a teenager, the specific character of authority is not the point.  It is not the details but the essence of authority that needs to be challenged.  Thereby, you forced me to realise that my own rebellion, a generation earlier, was less to do with the righteousness of my case than my need to have a case – any case – to sustain my emergent sense of independence.  The James Dean film is right: being a rebel is what matters, the precise nature of the cause a minor detail.

If the essence of adolescence is rebellion, then the burden of parenthood is the erosion of fraudulent authority.  I longed for my part in this drama to be over quickly, but that making it too easy – for me as well as you – would have been a great disservice to us both.  You needed to learn that you have to fight to be free; which meant that I, your father, had to resist, to try to keep you imprisoned in your childhood cocoon, despite my not wanting to.

And then – mirabile dictu –some evenings you would come home from school and talk about a lesson you had found interesting, a piece of work that you had enjoyed doing, a problem with a friend to which you had discovered a solution, a challenging incident in the playground or the street that you had responded to with maturity, an item on the news that had awoken your curiosity, an inappropriate remark or insult to one of your classmates that you had challenged.   From time to time, hope springs.

I’m guessing that a frictionless path from childhood to maturity makes for a weak person in later life.  The battles of my teenage years have surely held me in good stead during adulthood.  I hope that I made your adolescence hard enough for you to nurture your strength.  But I am so very happy that time is now in our shared past. Truly: the sign of failed parenting is not that your children break the house rules; it’s when they don’t.

 

It was a warm night in June, late in the evening but I had lost sense of time.  A bundle in a blanket was handed to me, lighter than I had anticipated, but heavy with expectation.   “You’ll need to put the baby-grow on her now”, I was told.  I was about to say, “How can I?  It’s in my bag.  How can I open my bag to find it if I’m holding the baby?”  Instead, I said to myself: “You have two hands.  Use them”.    It’s not an especially difficult task.  Quickly parents learn to open bags, doors and tins of baby milk-powder with one hand, while the other gently cradles and supports the new-born.  But the first time is experimental.  There is no preparation, no rehearsal, no training course that can capture the feeling: that moment when everything changes forever.  They say that the Rubicon was a small stream, but it carried a vast flow of meaning for those who waded across it.  One moment fatherhood is merely an idea, a theoretical proposition, the next it is a real, physical, urgent demand.  The baby is in my hands, wrapped in a hospital blanket and needing to be dressed for the night: I am on the cusp of becoming responsible.

I wrap my right hand around your small fingers and ease your arm into the sleeve.  Balancing your body on my leg, I use my free hand to open out the cuff, allowing me to draw your baby hand safely through.  I repeat three times for each of your other limbs.  I button up the baby-grow, which is now far too big but within weeks will be far too small.  For the next year you will change every day, but I know this moment will stay with me forever.  The first time that I dressed you, that I kept you warm, that I prepared you for sleep; the first time that I took responsibility for you because – for now – you cannot be responsible for yourself.

We have names and identities of our own, but our relationship to each other endows each of us with another name, another identity.  I am Mark and you are Ysabel, but I am your father and you are my daughter.  We are bound together, for better or worse.  Let’s hope for the better.  We will both need to work at that.  For now, there is a profound asymmetry in our relationship, which places an obligation on me that I want to understand in full, and discharge as best I can.  I know that you are a part of me, but also separate from me.  I want to protect you but not to suffocate you.  Sometimes at night when you cry, I take you downstairs and I sleep on the sofa, I lay you on top of me, with a blanket covering us both.  I worry that if I move in my sleep you will fall.  Instead I lay you by my side, but now I worry that if I roll-over I might crush you.  There is no good solution.  I lie awake and listen to you breathe.  I make sure you are warm.  I will be tired tomorrow at work.  Never mind.

Part of my responsibility is to be away from you: most days I go to work, to earn money, to pay the bills, to provide for you, to ensure stability and security as best I can.  Sometimes this is a relief: reading the FT on the bus, staring at my Reuters and Bloomberg screens, adult company and wine at lunch, hours spent puzzling over my Excel worksheets, looking for something that others have missed, trying to understood what these numbers and the shape of these graph-lines mean, more clearly, more fully than what is implied by the asset-weighted-market-average.  Sometimes a very early morning taxi takes me to the airport to catch an early morning flight to somewhere: where there are prospective clients with money to invest, or existing clients to whom reports must be made, or conferences at which to listen or to speak.  There are sights to be seen, people to meet, food and drink to enjoy.   Wherever I go, for however long I am away, there is always the moment of return: I will open our front door and you will be there.  Will you smile when you see me again?  Or will you scowl and turn the other way?  How little you know your power to break my heart.

I put you in the car seat and drive down to Whitechapel, to the large supermarket.  It’s not the nearest, but it is a trip out, just the two of us.  I have a long shopping list, but we have plenty of time and we have more than enough money to pay for the food.  Unlike the indoor adventure playground, to which I sometimes take you on a Saturday morning, at the car park we don’t have to pay an entry fee.  I put you in the shopping trolley with a child seat.  I check you are secure, holding the hand rail with me.  Then, I brace my arms, press down on my heels and I spin, around and around and around, with you shouting, “faster, faster, faster!”  You shriek with joy.  Dizzy Yzzie.  I stop the trolley and then we spin the other way.  You might be sick now, but it’s a risk worth taking, just to hear your laughter: no inhibition, no self-censorship, no socialized constraint, no decorum, no embarrassment, you just laugh, laugh and laugh, loud and free.  I love this sound, this intimacy, this shared moment.

You are very unimpressed when I take the stabilizer-wheels off your bike.  Now you can’t ride ever again, unless you learn to balance on two wheels.   We go to the park and practice.  It’s hard and you don’t manage it.  You complain.  You frown.  I am lost for words.  It’s hard to explain what to do.  Just keep trying.  It will come.  Maybe next weekend.  The following Saturday, another park, another glum face.  I persevere, but I prepare myself for failure rather than for success.  We try and you fall.  We try again and we make more progress.   I run along behind you holding the seat to help you balance.  This week is so much better than last week.  In your face there is a glimmer of hope.   We try one more time.  I stop running and you don’t notice that I am no longer holding you.  You are riding solo.  You have done it.  I stop and watch you pedal away from me.  Happy day!    Wait a moment, where are you going? Why don’t you stop?  Why don’t you turn around? Where are you going?

I feel sick.  I feel lost.  I feel helpless and foolish.  I was responsible for you and I have lost you, lost sight of you. You have learned to ride a bike and for your first expedition you have cycled off into the far distance and I have no idea where you are.  I have failed you.   I let go before we had agreed a plan on what to do, when you were able to ride on your own.   I start to run after you but what’s the point?  You can already ride faster than I can run, and you have a head-start.  I don’t know which way you will turn.  I don’t know whether you will be able to start again once you stop.  I don’t know whether you will find someone who can help you, or whether you will find someone who might harm you.  You are lost, and I am lost.

Penelope waited twenty years for Odysseus to return.  I waited barely twenty minutes but was equally joyful when you rode back into sight.  You were a little breathless but otherwise nonchalant, apparently unaware of the emotional trauma your little adventure across the park had inflicted upon me.  All smiles.  “Dad, I can ride” you tell me as if I hadn’t worked that out.  But you are back, you are safe, and my irresponsibility has gone unpunished.  I smile at your delight and my relief.  Lucky man.

Looking back, there were plenty of times when things might have turned out worse than they did.  All those random events that might have but didn’t happen – accidents or illnesses – the “left tail” as the statisticians would say, the heart-breaking moments that some parents suffer – unlikely but always possible – which we managed to avoid.  Happily, we found ourselves located within the better part of the normal distribution.  Sometimes behaving responsibly just wouldn’t be, just couldn’t be enough: but in my case, it was.  And I felt that burden, like a heavy winter coat draped upon my shoulders.  As you grew, day by day, from baby to toddler to child towards teenager, I felt the weight slowly lift.  My relief was genuine, but also tinged with concern: not that I desired to cling to my paternal role, to maintain you in a state of dependency, but a growing worry about my ability to help you gradually to assume responsibility for yourself.  There is no preparation for becoming a father, whether caring for a new-born baby girl, or preparing your daughter as she stumbles into the age or autonomy.  We had come a long way from that first June evening, but we still had plenty far to go.

 

 

Quickness of understanding is a mental faculty, but right doing requires the practice of a lifetime.     Goethe

I was sitting alone in the restaurant – which serves informal French cuisine with a good selection of regional wines – immersed in the New York Review of Books, when two young men – mid-twenties, one starting out in finance the other in politics – sat at the table next to me.  Their discussion was brisk and uninhibited, hard to ignore despite my best intentions.  After several minutes of gossip about mutual acquaintances, one changed the subject abruptly.

“Have you read this book by Daniel Kahneman?” he asked, “it’s called Thinking Fast and Slow.”  “No.  Is it any good?”  “Not really.  It’s far too long.  The basic idea is obvious could have been summarised in 25-pages.  He keeps repeating himself and includes endless stories and anecdotes.”  “OK that’s good to know, I won’t waste my time reading it.”

Momentarily, I was tempted to interrupt their conversation, to explain to them that if they were both to take a week off work, carefully to study Kahneman’s book and the wider literature he describes, it would be an investment that would repay them multiple times over the course of their lives.  I resisted the temptation and now I fear that both their careers will forever be blighted by loss.

These two men –still young but already in too much of a hurry – were thinking fast rather than thinking slow; which is to say, they were not really thinking at all.  When we apply our minds without reflection, without checking carefully for bias, for lack of relevant information in sufficient quantity, and for over-confidence, we tend to apply rules-of-thumb to cases for which they might not be applicable; it is quick but lazy.  Some people like to call this “intuition”, but I think “prejudice” is the better term.

Heuristic tools, which give standard answers in response to standard questions, are useful when the problems we face are minor and quotidian.  However, when things start to get harder, the quick responses soon become inadequate and a more considered approach is required.  And when we encounter problems about the most important questions in life – of freedom and duty, of value and meaning, of friendship and happiness – thinking fast is wholly unreliable.

Thinking slow – which is to say, really thinking – takes time and energy, which for evolutionary reasons we are disposed not to want to expend, even when we recognise that the standard answers will not work in this instance.  Nonetheless, without investing in the skills and disciplines of careful, reflective thought, we are condemned to rely on the first idea that lodges in our mind, which is often someone else’s fast thought, circulating around society like a virus, which we have picked up unknowingly simply through our proximity to those already infected.

What to do about lazy thinking?  Hard work seems to be the right answer.

I conceive of slow thought – that is, careful, reflective, unprejudiced thought – as a skill, which we should spend our lifetime acquiring, exercising and improving.  When we are young, we are often impatient to learn, and we have the capacity to pick up skills and ideas with great speed.  But learning to think is harder than learning to play chess or solve Sudoku puzzles.  It is harder than learning to play the piano.

Listening to Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations from 1955, when he was 22 years old, and comparing it to the recording he made in 1981, the year before he died aged 50, it seems to me that when he was young he knew how to play Bach well, but when he was older he had also learned how to interpret Bach well.  Unsurprisingly, his first recording of the work lasts for less than forty minutes, the second for more than fifty: he was playing fast and slow.

Learning to think is hard for two reasons.  First, most difficult situations we face in life are unique, even though the challenges are ubiquitous.  Learning how to support our children as they grow up, or how to manage our relations with our parents as they grow old, or how to maintain friendships over the years as the ties that once bound us together loosen apart, are experiences common to many of us; but that does not mean that there are simple, standard solutions.  Each version of the problem has its individual complexities which make it relevantly unlike other versions of the problem.  That’s one reason why books that set out ten rules for success, or seven principles that will lead to happiness, are so obviously misleading: there are no generic answers to life’s important questions.

A second reason is that as we grow older, we keep learning; indeed, one might go so far as to say (with Jürgen Habermas) that a characteristic of the human species is our inability not to learn. While all of us think differently when we are fifty to how we thought when we were twenty-five, some of us exhibit this trait more reliably than others.  As we learn, so we find better answers to questions that perplexed us when we were younger, and we also discover that some answers we previously accepted are in fact not so compelling.  Our judgement improves with use, which means that we need to keep building on its successes and working to reduce its failures.  Growing old is unavoidable, but becoming wiser is a choice, requiring time and effort.

One thing that doesn’t improve with age is our speed of thought.  Quickness is a gift of youth, and we will always celebrate the brilliance and inventiveness of the prodigy.  There is no reason to condescend just because we can no longer keep up with the generations that follow on from us.   But as Goethe came to understand – having himself been the youthful genius of German culture in the second half of the eighteenth century – the mental agility of clever young minds needs to give way to the patient accumulation of good practice, which over time constitutes a life well lived.

I recommend Kahneman’s book.  It is beautifully written, erudite and insightful.  It is both a critique of our tendency to rely on quick, immediate thoughts, and a paean to the cultivation of slow, careful, evidence-based reasoning.  It is a thorough presentation, using modern psychological research, of the case that Aristotle made more than two thousand years ago, that a lifetime devoted to good thinking is the most reliable route to happiness and the best protection against failure.

Everyone has a character of their own choosing, it is chance or fate that decides our choice of job.

Yesterday my team lost and consequently I was unhappy.  (Not least because they were beaten by the team my daughter supports).  I’m not unfamiliar with the experience of losing, which happens often enough.  The top English football teams will probably play more than fifty competitive games in a season and even the very best will lose around ten per cent of those in most years.   But being a fan – in my case, supporting the same team since I was eight years old – dictates that I will be happy when they win and unhappy when they lose.  Their successes and failures become mine, by proxy.  If I were indifferent to my team’s results, then I would no longer be a fan.

This being so, why be a fan?  Why put myself in the position that I allow events over which I have no control – no influence whatsoever – to determine my feelings, my mood, my sense of well-being?  Why risk the possibility of happiness in this way?   To understand my rationale, consider the words of a celebrated former manager of Liverpool Football Club, who once explained:  Someone said to me, ‘To you football is a matter of life or death!’ and I said, ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’.  It’s instructive to reflect on why this might be true.

Among the famous schools of classical Greek philosophy, the Stoics were renowned for their claim that happiness was to be achieved by living a virtuous life, and that those who were virtuous were happy, whatever befell them.   They taught that we should strive to cultivate a virtuous character and that if we did then, irrespective of our place in society, the circumstances under which our life passed, and the good or bad luck that we encountered day by day, we would be happy.   Since virtuous actions and dispositions are within our power to choose – everyone has a character of their own choosing, says Seneca – it follows that our achievement of happiness is consequent solely upon decisions we make for ourselves.   Fate might cause us all sorts of problems, but it cannot remove our power to determine our happiness.

This has always been a controversial claim, and not just because of the employment choices that fate allowed Seneca to make.  Well before the Roman Stoics set out the case for being indifferent to fate, Aristotle had noted – in the Nicomachean Ethics – that when external events turn out very bad for us, as was the case for King Priam of Troy, it is hard to see how we can continue to be described as happy.  Aristotle accepts that small pieces of good or bad fortune that are outside of our control clearly do not weigh down the scales of life one way or another.  It is possible for someone to experience modest bad luck from time to time, but to live an active and virtuous life and to achieve happiness.

However, whether the big events of our lives turn out well or badly for us will have a material impact on our ability to live well and to be happy.  If we enjoy many major strokes of good fortune, they will add beauty to our lives and enable us to demonstrate nobility in our actions; conversely, if many important events turn out badly for us, they will crush and maim our happiness, through the pain they bring us, and because they hinder our ability to act virtuously.   Even in these cases, Aristotle thinks that the noble character of a virtuous person will shine through, visible in the way that misfortunes are borne.

Aristotle’s argument – that we achieve happiness through our pursuit of virtue, but that external circumstances might constrain our ability to live a good life and achieve lasting happiness – has a parallel with the more recent argument that Karl Marx made, that we make our own history, but we do not make it as we please but under the circumstances that we inherit from the past.   The point for both philosophers is that context is material and, therefore, the belief that our destiny and our happiness are wholly within our own control is illusory.

This is a lesson that is easy to forget, especially when for lengthy periods nothing significantly bad happens to us.  When context is persistently benign, we disregard its threat.  Few of us ever undergo a transformation in the circumstances of our lives of the magnitude that King Priam witnessed, and many of us manage to avoid serious episodes of bad luck for decades.   We are thus seduced into forgetting the fragility of our pursuit of happiness.  We might work hard at living well, we might believe that we are happy, but then, one day, things fall apart.  Due to circumstances beyond our control, and irrespective of the virtues we have cultivated for many years, our grasp on happiness is gone, perhaps not lost forever, but certainly damaged irreparably.

My team losing is not a disaster.  The result was bad rather than good news for me, but it did not weigh down the scales of my life.  My sadness will be very temporary, but the reminder is valuable.  Every time my team plays, they risk losing and I risk a modest bout of unhappiness; but every day, my happiness is in jeopardy, for it might be snatched away from me, subject to the vagaries of ill-fortune.  That’s why sport might well be more than a life and death matter: because it reminds us that achieving happiness is never fully in our control, that we are vulnerable to fate, that contingency must be accommodated and borne with dignity.

There’s a further lesson here too, that should encourage us to be suspicious of Seneca’s over confidence.  He believed in his power to isolate himself from fate but, famously, was forced to kill himself at the insistence of Nero, his former pupil, who suspected his involvement in a plot.  A noble death?  Perhaps, but also an unhappy end to a long and rich life.

Aristotle shows greater wisdom, both in his appreciation of the nuanced relationship between the virtuous life and happiness, but also in his reminder of our permanent vulnerability to having our happiness snatched away from us.  We can be better prepared for whatever the future holds if we avoid hubris and wishful thinking.