Red Wings, Part 2

I have to admit, when a children's book makes my brain churn as much as The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings, I have to love it, even if I loathe my interpretation of its message.

Yesterday I wrote about my own hissing dislike of Red Wings.  RebeccaFrog, who had introduced me to the book, left some delicious comments in reaction to my reaction.  Completely unrelated, she also drew my attention to a  "cute" little picture being passed around Facebook: a sweating rhinoceros, on a treadmill.  Behind the rhino, taped to the wall, is a picture of a unicorn.

The rhinoceros picture alone is a tragically poignant and humorous summing up of our culture's attitudes towards beauty: we torture ourselves to look like starved supermodels who themselves are Photoshopped to be more thin and lovely than nature can manage.  But the real kicker was the caption on the image: "Never give up on your dreams."

Before I touch that, let me flip over to a fragment of an interview I caught on public radio some months ago.  The scientist being interviewed had spent time studying happiness in America.  He had data showing that our typical happiness over time takes a walloping nose dive when we are in our twenties.  Then it goes up again.  There might have been dips in the teen years and at midlife-crisis time, but I do recall with certainty that the major dip corresponded with the transition from life as a college student to life as a real adult.  And after that point, happiness went mostly up, and up, and up.

And what happens to us when we get out of college?  We get a job, get married, have kids; and we face the ultimate dark truth that we can't be the astronaut or the rock star or famous artist that we had fixated on being for so very long.  But then we reset our goals: get a promotion, go to the beach with the family, buy a house.  Once our goals are no longer out of reach, we become happy again.

 The notion that we, as rhinoceroses, should never give up trying to be the mythical unicorn is a recipe for a future in therapy.  If you make the achievement of an unreachable goal the necessary step to becoming happy, then you will by definition never be happy.  And yet our society places an emphasis on binding happiness to the achievement of goals.

But the flip side of our culture are the cultures around the world that do place an emphasis on finding happiness in what you are given.  But so often these cultures involve gross inequalities and human rights abuses.  It is one thing to find a zen peace in accepting that you will never get to ride on the space shuttle; it is quite another to ask a child bride to find joy in the abusive relationship she has been put into against her wishes.

But here is another complication: people appear by and large to be happier when they make an irreversible decision than when they are permitted to change their minds.  Once again, this comes from an interview I caught on public radio that, dang it, I have no link to.  Sorry!  There was a study involved, and the implications were creepy.  (Which college?  Which career?  Career or family?Divorce! Abortion!)  The author of the study went on a bit about how we tie our happiness to achieving our goals, and how as a culture we don't like to admit that we can also successfully convince ourselves to be happy when we fail to reach our goals.  And the reason we don't like to go there is because we see that sort of happiness as being fake.

I'm as indoctrinated as the rest of my generation of goal-seeking affluent white Americans, so when I see a story from 1945 about a bunny who gives up on a dream to instead accept his lot in life, my reaction is to hiss at it.

My more delayed reaction is to put the book on my Amazon wishlist.  I do believe I want a copy of The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings on my shelf.  It will sit right next to The Giving Tree, which will be the topic of a future blog post.  Red Wings isn't necessarily one I will pull out to read to my kids, but it will be on my mind as I try to figure out what stories I can tell that will help guide future generations to neither entirely accept their lot in life, nor tie their happiness to the achievement of shoot-for-the-moon goals.