A happy day with the happiest people

Each time this past week I’ve started writing this entry, I’ve begun by discussing a different theme, then got distracted, and found that the thing which distracted me was equally deserving of some attention – and being more recent, therefore a better way to begin.

This, needless to say, is going to be a problem all year unless I figure out a way to get a handle on it and just sit down and write what comes. So I’ve had a chin-scratch about the various things I’ve seen and experienced in the past week or so, and decided to tell you about Families’ Open Day at a metallurgy workshop for the mentally challenged, in a small town an hour outside Munich. Because a lot can be said about life’s capacity to be utterly and tediously shit and unfair (and I say a lot of it myself), but sometimes you get to see something pretty special. And last Sunday, something truly special I did see.

Before getting to that though, I’d like to beg your patience in permitting me reproduction of a bit from the inimitable Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness. He wrote, in 1930:

“The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means of great wealth [man] can gratify all his whims without effort, the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness. The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness. If he is of a philosophic disposition, he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy. He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

This paragraph bears reproduction because we all know people, whether by type or by individual, who through their pursuit of recognition or material wealth have come to value each further acquisition relatively less and less. I’m pretty sure we as humans feel the greatest happiness of all from having our basic needs met and from not having that which we truly value taken away. Yet few of us can know this other than in the abstract because we go a lifetime with having those basic needs threatened. Seldom in the developed world do people unavoidably go hungry or thirsty or without shelter at night. Seldom are parents unable to offer basic health care to their children. Seldom do people live in chronic, untreated, tortuous pain.

Thankfully, I’m not one of these either, so this may all be more presumption than assumption. But it seems clear to me that the hot meal to the starving family or the water to the parched child, or the warm blankets to the freezing homeless person, or the parent who sees his or her child given life-saving medication – well, this must give the most happiness, relatively speaking, of all. I don’t think you have to experience it to know viscerally what it would mean.

So as one goes up the list from Basic Needs, to Recommended Things, to General Desirables, to Material Items of Lust, to Frivolous Luxuries – each offers less and less happiness to the man who has climbed already all the previous rungs of the ladder. Russell’s point, I think, is that real happiness can only be born from challenges and the overcoming of them. “Life is supposed to be Hard” is probably the appropriate platitude here (although often substituted by people who should know better with its patronising and asinine sibling, “Life wasn’t supposed to be Easy”).

But semantic snobbery notwithstanding, last weekend I had the supremely rewarding experience of a day spent playing various sporting games with mentally challenged Germans (tut tut, no jokes), at which I was markedly less successful than one might otherwise expect. Yet the whole thing was rigged and I’d like that noted for the record. But I’ll come back to how the referees were out to get me a little bit later.

Anyway, I headed to a small town about an hour outside Munich, with my old friend Jim and his girlfriend, to visit her brother’s Open Day at his workshop. His name is Flo, he’s 18, he has a Down’s Syndrome girlfriend called Judith, and the Bavarian state pays for the most splendidly appointed workshop where various mentally challenged people of all ages and levels of disability get to acquire skills in woodwork and metallurgy and sell what they create to the community. The items they were producing were way beyond my meagre capabilities in this regard (drill bits, gears, models, pen holders) but that’s hardly the point.

The point is that for a whole day, I was given a tour of the workshops by the students – each, to a person, beaming with pride at their Centre and what they do. Flo earns the nominal amount of €57 per month for his travails, but he (as with the majority of the students there) lacks any real conception of relative monetary value, so his sense of accomplishment at what he does during his workday could hardly be greater. He won’t ever be able to have a “proper” job, and every society in the history of the world has had those unable to do so. But through this program, he and Judith get the sense of self-worth that only the creation of a ‘thing’ can give. The ‘thing’ can be physical or not, but an individual’s self-esteem is dictated by his or her knowledge that – whatever the challenges faced or caveats attached – he or she provides something to the community as a whole.

So after the tour of the workshops at which things were produced that I couldn’t even name let alone make, we came to the gorgeous open grassed courtyard (pictured) where a series of stations were set up with games being played. Darts, table tennis, basketball, beer curling, football and target shooting – each supervised and refereed. I was giddy with excitement.

Let me underline that although it admittedly wasn’t my greatest ever sporting performance, the predominant reason I was taken to the cleaners by a bunch of smiling, giggling adult-children with IQs in the 60s was SHAMELESS AND CYNICAL NEPOTISM by referees hell bent on my humiliating destruction. By the time I received my condescending Certificate of Encouragement and consolation prize alongside a ten year old girl with half an ice cream smeared over her face and who kept walking in circles, my mortification and the shame brought upon my family… was complete.

But they all came over to me, smiling as bloody always, and held my hand and felt sorry for me and I had that rare and exquisite moment, when time stops still and you can see beyond the abject shittiness of practically everything, the cynicism and greed and manifest unfairness and palpable human suffering which surrounds us – and you see that there is, once in a while, real goodness in Man.

Because even thought Germany is bankrupt and the social democratic model they espouse may very well be ultimately unaffordable, not a penny, not one single penny of funding for this magnificently compassionate enterprise I visited comes from private charity. It is paid for by the State, because, one can only assume, the fine citizens of Bavaria have concluded that there aren’t many more important things to spend money on than ensuring that those without opportunity – through no fault of their own – get a real and fulfilling life. I know the citizens themselves don’t organise these projects directly, but unless there is popular support, such projects never get off the ground. People, in other words, want – they demand – facilities like this to exist.

And so, I was struck, dumbstruck in fact, by the pervasive goodwill about the place, by the sense of care and community and pride. Russell was right about this: those who have obstacles to overcome, who cannot ‘acquire easily things’ are able to better extract life’s little happinesses in the long run. And as I ate my enormous and unnecessarily stinky fish and accompanying pretzel (pictured) and watched a dance performance which, despite what it lacked in grace and choreography made up for in hysterical enthusiasm (pictured too) I reflected once again that there are rare but special moments when you see humanity’s best rather than its worst – and it surprises you every time. Thus it was that I got to pass an educational and heartwarming day in Bavaria with the happiest people you could ever hope to meet.

For that, I would like to thank them all.

I’m in Austria now, and off to Hungary tomorrow, where I will tell you about how the Bavarians undid all their abovementioned good work by chasing me out of Garmisch-Paternkirchen with white sausages and pitchforks.

Bastards.