The 2009 Sense Annual Lecture  
‘The pursuit of happiness’ 
4th November 2009 
 
 
  
Speaker key 
  
RB            Richard Brook   
LL             Lord Lawson 
PS         Professor Schoch 
PH            Paul Hart 
MF         Member of the Floor 
 
 
  
RB    This is one of the best evenings of the year for me because I’m given about 90 seconds to say something, hand over to the rest of the people for the night and enjoy what’s going to happen.  For any of you who don’t know me, my name is Richard Brook and I’ve got the real privilege of being Chief Executive of Sense.  Most of you will know what Sense is because you’re here tonight, you’ve been invited by us but we’re the leading deafblind charity, in fact in different ways, across the whole of the UK with our partner organization, Sense Scotland, and we’re actually one of the top 50 UK charities and that’s one of the things we’re working hard at the moment to make people realize the width and breadth of the work that we do. 
 
Once a year we bring people together to hear some latest thinking, generally about issues that might interest us and also specifically about deafblind individuals, and that’s this event tonight, the third Annual Sense lecture, and I don’t have to say much more because fortunately we have very eminent Chair, Lord Lawson, who’s agreed to be with us.  I don’t really need to give Lord Lawson’s CV; many of you will know he’s one of the most eminent politicians of the 80s, 90s and into this decade, particularly in the House of Lords now and he will chair us ably through this evening and introduce the speakers and right at the end of the evening our Chairman, John Crabtree, who has the unfortunate short straw of sitting next to me all evening, will end the evening and say some thanks.  So, without much more to-do, I really hope you enjoy this evening. 
 
Sense is very proud of all it does with deafblind people on the ground but it’s also proud to be really involved in trying to push back the barriers of understanding and tonight’s topic, Happiness, is something that, for many individuals who are deafblind, indeed all of us, is something that we strive for and sometimes don’t always find, so it’ll be fascinating tonight to hear more about that and to experience more about people’s understanding of that word, happiness.  So, without any more to-do, over to you Lord Lawson, thank you very much for being here and we’ll put the event into your very, very capable hands.  
 
LL Thank you very much for your very kind introduction and let me first of all welcome you all to the Sense Annual lecture.  It’s not really an annual lecture; it’s really two.  You’ve got two for the price of one, so this is a great evening.  I’m very happy to be here.  This is a cause which clearly merits a great deal of support and it’s good to see so many of you here today.  The first of our two very eminent speakers, speaking about the pursuit of happiness in memory of Norman Brown, parent and inspirational speaker on deafblindness, is Professor Richard Schoch on my left.  He is the Professor of the History of Culture and Director of the Graduate School in Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary College, University of London.  He’s done a lot of work in this area.  
 
His most recent book is called The Secrets of Happiness: 3000 Years of Searching for the Good Life and you can get it from Profile… it’s published by Profile Books, scrivener 2006 and it has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian but, if you want to get it in English, just log on to Amazon and I’m sure they’ll be happy to supply it to you.  He’s been awarded Fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Stanford Humanities Centre, the American Society where he hails from originally, from the United States, for theatre research and the Harry Ransom Centre and he’s given guest lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, the Shakespeare Institute and UCLA.  He also serves on the Advisory Council for the education think-tank, AGARA, which I have to confess I don’t know a great deal about, but I’m told that it is a very good think-tank.   He’s also spoken at public events for the Wellcome Trust, the Institute of Ideas, the Royal Society of Arts… he’s a most busy man… the Cheltenham Science Festival, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and he’s a regular commentator for the BBC and his current projects are on leisure, not sure that he gets much of it mind you, letters and Victorian Shakespeare.  So, I have great pleasure in asking Professor Schoch to give his lecture. 
 
PS   Thank you very much for the very kind introduction; I’m very grateful for that, also to John and Richard for inviting me to be here tonight with you.  I find this at once both a daunting, flattering and humbling occasion for me and I feel very privileged to be with you this evening to talk about the pursuit of happiness.  I’d like to begin in a slightly paradoxical way.  I’m happy is the story of happiness.  
  
More than 2000 years ago, when the Ancient Greeks thought about what the good life means, happiness was a civic virtue that demanded a lifetime’s cultivation; now it’s everybody’s birthright.  Swallow a pill, get happy; do yoga, find your bliss; hire a life coach, regain your self-esteem.   We have lost contact with the old and rich traditions of happiness and we have lost the ability to understand their essentially moral nature.  Spurning the wisdom of the ages, we deny ourselves the chance of finding a happiness that is meaningful.  We’ve settled nowadays for a much thinner, much weaker version of happiness, mere accumulation of pleasure, mere avoidance of pain.  Somewhere between Plato and Prozac happiness stopped being a lofty achievement and became an entitlement programme. 
   
Over the past decade, behavioural scientists, neuroscientist, psychologists and economists have been measuring reported levels of happiness and identifying its causes using such methods as online surveys and brain scans.  Apparently the scientists say the type of person least likely to be happy is a neurotic introvert, which is very bad news for me.  But what the scientists have concluded seems almost commonsensical; apparently what makes us happy are sex, friends, job satisfaction, a stable family and a short commute, but actually 4% of respondents claim to enjoy traffic jams.  I have no idea who these people are.  If you believe the scientists, it’s pretty easy to make yourself happy; live within walking distance of an enjoyable and secure job, prop up the bar with your friends after work, go home and have sex, preferably with your spouse.  The secret revealed; how to be happy.  Who could argue with that?  I want to argue with that.  
  
This new science of happiness, I believe, fails to yield significant insights, ones that tell us something new about the search for happiness because it’s based upon a flawed premise.  If your premise is flawed, your conclusions will also be flawed.  Nearly all researchers, whether they’re psychologists or economists, define happiness as a positive emotional state.  As the economist and friend of Lord Lawson, Richard Layard says, happiness is feeling good, enjoying life and wanting the feeling to be maintained.  The scientists define happiness that way because emotional states can be described, measured and compared across subject groups and these are the things that scientists need to do.  The problem is that this definition of happiness is insufficient; it captures at best a partial truth and what we want is the whole truth. 
   
Here are three reasons; there are many more but just three, about why happiness cannot be reduced to feeling good.   First, positive emotions are fleeting; they rarely survive the events that promoted them, whether scoring a goal in a football match or finishing a jigsaw puzzle.  What we want is a happiness that lasts.  Second , we can never be sure that the pleasures we want, money to spend, success to enjoy, beauty to flaunt, we can never be sure that the pleasures we want are the pleasures we get because frequently it all comes down to luck and timing and who wants their happiness to be so random?  Finally, we shouldn’t feel good all the time.  
  
Positive emotions are misplaced in many circumstances; visiting a friend in hospital, consoling your daughter when she doesn’t win a ribbon on sports day, apologizing for hurting someone you love.  A life of unremitting cheerfulness is a life of delusion because it refuses to acknowledge the ups and downs that are part of every normal life.  The only people who go around smiling all the time are mad people.  For all its boldness the so-called science of happiness is deficient in its understanding of happiness but the scientists really had in mind are things like optimism, confidence, self-esteem; these are good things, these are excellent things but let’s not mistake them for happiness.  Yet, by emphasizing enjoyment and good feeling, the psychologists risk turning happiness into something dangerously selfish; again mere accumulation of pleasure, avoidance of pain.  Of course, that’s what so many of us already believe. 
 
We also believe that happiness is a kind of consumer product.  Unlike most people who have ever lived on this planet, we feel entitled to a happy life by which we mean a joyous and carefree life and so we worry that we’re not sitting on top of the world every single minute and that’s why self-help books generate £2 billion of sales every year across the world.  The desire industry, botox jabbers, personal trainers, lifestyle gurus, they take in even more but these are all sham versions of happiness, sham pads to happiness because all they do is glorify the ego, but undeniably happiness is a growth industry, it is the ultimate luxury item and what makes us such good customers is our selfishness.  We want happiness and we want it now.  In our haste to be happy, we might even look to the government. 
   
Politicians, if you can believe this, on both the left and the right have been advocating without a trace of irony a, quote, happiness-based approach to public policy.  They propose that the State should start worrying about gross national happiness as much as it worries about gross national product, although right now it doesn’t seem the State can deliver either.  There is some logic to this.  Research does show that beyond a minimum level of security and comfort and in Western industrialized nations, it’s only about £20,000 a year.  Beyond that minimum level, increased prosperity, a bigger house, a higher salary, a flashier car does not increase happiness.  Richer but not happier is a frequent headline.   
 
So the economists have concluded that if government really wants to improve our lives, the State should care less about what we earn and more about what we feel, how we feel.  Attention seeking politicians have picked up on the warm and fuzzy aspects of this research and now say thinks like, make room for fun, laughter and play.  Such is the reassuring advice from Tessa Jowell and I suppose that’s what qualifies her to be the Olympics minister.  But we mustn’t forget David Cameron’s hug a hoodie either.  But why should we expect politicians to accomplish what we must accomplish for ourselves.  Happiness is not an entitlement programme to be run by civil servants with their unlovely apparatus of targets and benchmarks and key performance indicators.  The State ought to ensure that nothing obstructs our happiness but what the pursuit of happiness entails, choices we make, actions we undertake, goals we set, relationships we form, that’s up to us.  To believe that the government can make you happy is to rely upon a seriously deficient view of government, to say nothing of the State itself. 
 
It does not have to be that way.  We must abandon the mistaken view that happiness is simply feeling good, a commodity for sale or a government-led initiative.  We need to recover its ancient traditions, the traditions that began in the West with the philosophers of Athens and in the East with the anonymous Hindi sages of the Axial Age.  We can, with no exaggeration, call these traditions a secret, so unpractised if not obscured have they become.  Yet the secret, sometimes called philosophy, sometimes called religion, the label scarcely matters, this secret will not resist our attempt to find it.  Perhaps the best way to introduce these traditions is through stories, so let me tell you about three people, two historical, one mythical, who long ago and far away, in moments of trauma and terrible strain, reflected profoundly about happiness and then allowed these reflections to suffuse their lives with purpose and meaning.  We may not share the lonely burdens of these extraordinary characters or we may, we may not share their ferocious courage but we are dashed by the same troubles and can be restored by the same consolations. 
 
First story; why would someone write a book about happiness while awaiting execution for a crime he did not commit?  Within four years of invading Italy, in 489 AD, Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, a figure well-known to this audience I’m sure, established himself as governor of the western half of the Roman Empire and although officially a servant of the Emperor in Constantinople, Theodoric ruled his chunk of the Roman world wisely and justly, at least according to the more relaxed standards of the 5th century.  So, how did it come to pass that a ruler esteemed for his fairness would imprison and execute his most trusted and blameless advisor? 
 
The wrongly condemned man was Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.  For years Boethius had served Theodoric well and eventually he was appointed consul, a position that had long ceased to matter politically but still carried great symbolic weight.  Theodoric entrusted Boethius with increasingly substantial responsibilities, to the point where he ran the imperial household and the civil service but, in a moment of paranoia, Theodoric wrongly suspected his loyal servant of treason and brought him down on trumped up charges of conspiracy.  This reversal of fortune led to disgrace, exile, imprisonment, death.  Living under a capital sentence, Boethius could not help but wonder, in sadness, in anger, why do bad things happen to good people?  If the universe is unjust, and it is, how can anyone be sure of finding happiness?  The question is grievously perennial.  You only have to read the book of Job. 
  
Boethius could not have imagined that his response, a prison memoir with a mythical dimension called the Consolation of Philosophy, would survive to become one of the world’s great texts on happiness.  Artfully weaving poetry and prose, the Consolation is a dialogue between a sick prisoner, a thinly veiled version of Boethius, and his nurse Lady Philosophy.  If only nurses on the NHS were Lady Philosophy, what a world that would be.  She’s the emblematic figure of consolation.  Appearing from on high, as nurses do, she descended to impart wisdom to Boethius who beings the work enveloped by ignorance but ends it liberated by knowledge.  Lady Philosophy opens with a timeless rebuke, why do you mortals seek happiness outside yourselves when it lies within you? 
 
Second story; in Baghdad toward the end of the 11th century an acclaimed Islamic scholar fell mysteriously ill, renounced his career and spent two years praying in a mosque in Damascus.  His name was Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.  Born in the Persian city of Tûs, he grew up to be an authority on Islamic law, for which he was honoured with the titles, The Proof of Islam, and The Ornament of Faith.  At the young age of 33 he was appointed to a professorship at the Nizamiyya College in Baghdad.  Shortly after reaching this position of intellectual eminence, he fell victim to a debilitating, spiritual crisis.   
 
It turned out to be his first step on the road to happiness, a quest that would take him to distant lands over many years.  At the height of his success Ghazali realized, to his shame, that he was too much with the world, too entangled in its net.  He doubted the worth of the subjects he taught and he admitted, if only to himself, that his motive for doing so was the basest of all possible motives, pride.  As he lived in fear and indecision, his crisis worsened.  One day, standing before his students, about to give a lecture, he suddenly lost the power of speech.  I hope that same fate will not befall me tonight.  Soon he could not swallow food.  Ghazali, who possessed the soul of a poet, diagnosed himself allegorically; the physical illness was but the outward symbol of an underlying spiritual illness.  He stood in danger not of losing his mortal body, that would perish anyway, but of losing something far more precious, his immortal soul.  Just as the crisis was extreme, so was its cure.  
 
At the pinnacle of his fame Ghazali abandoned his career, his friends, his wealth.  After placing his sons in the care of relatives and leaving money for their education, he travelled to Damascus and spent two years in reflection and meditation and there he became convinced, not in his mind, it’s easy to become convinced in your mind, but in his innermost being that only through direct experience could he find the joy that comes from knowing God; that was for him the definition of happiness.  It’s not the definition of happiness for everybody but it was for him.  He saw happiness as a sort of communion with the transcended, as being engaged or enveloped into something larger than himself.  His crisis coincided with his introduction to Sufism, which is the mystical side of Islam.  It doesn’t preach doctrine or dogma but it affirms above all else the transforming power of personal experience.  The Sufis call this dhawq, taste, which nicely captures the sensuous immediacy of their vision of happiness.  As the Sufis say, those who taste know.  Renouncing his confidence in reason, this man is a professor, Ghazali vowed to walk in the mystic way so that he might encounter the transcendent wisdom whose only source was direct experience.    

What he learned from his conversion to mysticism Ghazali recorded in the Alchemy of Happiness, a short book of moral guidance written in Persian for a popular audience.  It was the world’s first self-help book written 1,000 years ago.  The clue to the secret of happiness is in the title.  Just as the alchemist transforms base metals into precious ones, lead into gold, we can transform our vices into virtues.  In the alchemy of happiness we become the best possible version of ourselves, the most precious form of our rough matter.   
 
Third story; someone who struggled to become a better version of themselves was Prince Arjuna, the hero of the Bhagavad Gita, the devotional poem whose popularity and authority in Hindu culture has remained unsurpassed for 2,000 years.  To that great and mysterious question, how do we find happiness, the Gita offers three answers; through the way of knowledge, the way of love and the way of action.  Prince Arjuna is the model, the archetype, for finding happiness through action in the world.  The story, part of the larger epic known as The Mahabharata, opens on a battlefield where the Kauravas are fighting their cousins, the Pandavas.  Arjuna is a young Pandava warrior and he refuses to fight his cousins but his companion Krishna, who is actually the god Vishnu in disguise, tells Arjuna that it would be shameful and unmanly to renounce his obligation to fight because that is what the obligation of his caste demands and Arjuna must uphold that duty.  
 
That line of reasoning, you must do your duty, does persuade Arjuna but one thing still bothers him.  What attitude, he says, what attitude should I have toward my actions?  Or, to put it into modern idiom, what psychological disposition should he have?  Krishna answers, we must act; passivity is not an option but we must act with indifference, neither pinning our hopes on one outcome nor praying to avoid another at all costs.  

Let’s be clear; to be detached, to be indifferent doesn’t mean you don’t act; you do act but you are neutral or indifferent to the outcome.  You still have desires but you don’t pin everything on having your desires satisfied.  The desire to be happy is a desire, the desire to protect your children is a desire.  Desire isn’t the problem; it’s how you relate to desire that’s the problem; whether desire controls you or you control your desire.  We have to step back from our desires, this is what the Gita teaches, and be detached from the fruits of our labour, whether gain or loss, praise or blame, joy or sorrow.  In truth, we must look upon ourselves not as the author of our actions but as the compliant instrument through which they are achieved.  That’s one of the Gita’s fundamental teachings. 
   
This freedom to do what seems right, what seems best for the circumstance, this freedom to control your desire rather than having it control you, this freedom can only be attained through discipline for which the ancient Sanskrit word is yoga, a term much misunderstood in the modern West.  Action without yoga, without control, is idle movement, just spinning your wheels or revving your engine.  To give action its ultimate meaning we need to temper it through yoga.  Stand fast in yoga, Krishna commands, in success and failure be the same.  I think that’s an incredibly powerful message; in success and failure be the same.  If we’re looking for a marching order for happiness I think this is it. 
 
The lives of Boethius, Ghazali and the mythical Prince Arjuna defy every attempt at pattern detection.   There’s no pattern in location, a prison for enemies of Rome, a mosque in Damascus, a battlefield in India; spanning 2,300 years these stories encompass Europe on the cusp of the Middle Ages, an Islamic civilization that stretched across three continents, an Indian history shrouded in myth. On the face of things there’s little to connect a Roman civil servant unjustly executed, a Persian scholar who traded books for mystic ecstasy and a Hindu warrior prince who once hesitated on the field of battle.  But the face of things is not the basis of things.   
 
The world’s great thinkers about happiness are bound to be different in time, different in place, different in language and culture.  How could it be otherwise?  Inevitable though these differences are, they cannot obscure the deep similarities in how we all search for happiness.  The stories of Boethius, Ghazali and Arjuna resonate with us today thousands of years later because they are in fact our own stories.  In these stories we find not enigmatic figures from an alien past but magnified, magnificent versions of ourselves and from these stories we can learn a few lasting truths about the pursuit of happiness.  In the classical manner I’ll phrase these truths as proverbs.  There are three. 
 
Proverb one; catch big fish.  On a large wooden plaque that for many years hung in my father’s study was mounted a fish that he caught off the Florida coast.  It was the biggest fish he ever caught and it was the only one he ever displayed.  Its trophy status was never in doubt and the search for happiness is something like that.  It’s about reeling in the big fish, the only kind that matters even if it means a lot of struggle, which of course it will.  Boethius, Ghazali and Arjuna all fished in deep waters, to extend the metaphor.  They shared a commitment to discovering the ultimate ends and purposes of life and they believed in the importance of leading a life that was worthwhile.  In different ways they all reflected upon the shape, the character of their lives as a whole.  In his prison cell Boethius pondered whether happiness and virtue could survive in a world of misery and evil.  Ghazali, afflicted with an inner torment, recognized that his declining health was a summons to cure his sickened soul and Arjuna, hesitating on the brink of action, learned that duty and discipline were the unlikely ingredients of happiness.  These moments of reckoning all occurred under harrowing conditions, injustice, emotional collapse, profound uncertainty.   
 
Mercifully most of us will be spared such torments but we do have our moments of reckoning and, of course, I’m well aware I’m speaking to an audience acquainted with some of life’s most profound challenges.  We know what we’re talking about.  It would be extraordinary for any of us suddenly to quit our job, leave our family, move to a new country but we can still appreciate why in Baghdad 1,000 years ago someone felt compelled to do just that.  In Ghazali’s dilemma we recognize a serious version of that psychotherapeutic cliché, the mid-life crisis.  The frightening prospect that the life we have so carefully built over the years is without purpose and without value.  Ghazali’s heroic effort to restore meaning to his life is, I think, a distant mirror of our own attempts to straighten out the mess in our own lives.  
  
Not too long ago there was a newspaper report about a man who became a millionaire in the lottery but, within a year, he had spent all his winnings and then got himself arrested on a drugs charge.  Clearly this man was no happier despite the short-term pleasure he derived from his financial windfall.  And the sense of waste that characterizes this story, all that money and he did what?  The sense of waste invites comparison.  We wonder whether such extreme good fortune would make us happy.  What we have in mind is not the pleasure of winning the money; that we take for granted but we think about how the money might transform our life and we ask ourselves whether we, if we had won the lottery, would have made better use of the money.  To think like that is to think about the quality of your life as a whole.  You understand your life as a series of actions and you know that some actions are better than others.  
 
This way of thinking is, of course, intimately tied to making decisions.  When we arrive at the inevitable crossroads of life, we must choose a direction; do I marry or forsake this person, do I honour or betray my friends, do I tell or conceal the truth?  We should not decide such things unthinkingly but so often we do.  We need to think about what we want our life to be like and then act accordingly.  Everybody’s search for happiness demands this kind of big thinking but it’s very difficulty to be self-aware for just one minute let alone an entire lifetime. 
 
What about the little fish?  We have not forgotten them, nice feelings, good moods, raw pleasure.  They matter but not as much as we suppose.  We all know what obviously happy moments are like; we feel great, everything we desire lies within our grasp and fortunately there is no end to the experiences that make us feel good.  Enjoying a delicious meal, swimming in the ocean, just feeling the warmth of the sun on your skin, these are the incidents that joyfully crowd a life and make it wonderful but do they make it happy?  And, if so, how much happiness do they yield?  
 
The late philosopher, Robert Nozick, described these experiences as how life feels from the inside.  He meant the warmth, the glow that radiates inside us when we enjoy life but, no matter how wonderful life feels from the inside, these feelings are but the beginning of happiness, not its ultimate destination because we care about many things other than pleasurable experiences.  We care about the integrity of our values and beliefs, we care about our accomplishments, we care about leaving a legacy to the world, we care about the wellbeing of the people in our lives and, if we’re truly magnanimous, we care about the wellbeing of people not in our lives, and all of these cares bind us to the world through what we believe, what we achieve and whom we love.  This is the ultimately moral shape of each person’s happiness and what makes it dependant upon the happiness of others.  Happiness probably will begin with pleasurable feelings but it will go well beyond them because happiness is not really about feeling good, it’s about being good and the problem is that we are apt to mistake the former for the latter. 
  
It was ironically the 20th century’s most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes, and I put this in as a tribute to our Chair this evening, who said, material prosperity could never confer upon individuals the purposiveness, as he called it, that is a necessary part of happiness.  Back in 1928, Keynes predicted that when humanity was at last freed from the bondage of poverty and deprivation, may that moment come soon, it would face the more profound challenge of using its material freedom, this is Keynes, to live wisely and agreeably and well.  I think that’s a terrific phrase. 
 
Who would rise up to meet this challenge?  Not those who get and spend but those who, says Keynes again, cultivate into a fuller perfection the art of life itself.  Now, he defined that, the art of life, as being more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their immediate effects upon our environment.  In other words, Keynes was saying happiness isn’t really about serving ourselves; it’s about serving others, that remote future, especially the others who are destined never to know. 
   
Proverb two; wrestle, don’t dance.  Marcus Aurelius, ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 AD and he spent many of those years fighting off foreign invasion in Northern Italy and Germany and it was during those harsh military campaigns that Marcus recorded his private thoughts in a document that he entitled, To Myself.  Written in Greek, the language of the examined life, the Emperor’s moral diary is better known to posterity as The Meditations.  Part of what has ensured that this book has never lacked for readers over 18 centuries is that its author knew how to turn a phrase and Marcus’s favourite image for happiness was wrestling.  In one of the most insightful passages, Marcus explains that happiness feels more like wrestling than dancing because it requires us to stand prepared and unshaken to meet what comes and what we did not foresee.  Marcus’s words are tough and unforgiving and they were meant to be.  If that old soldier had written with more delicacy, more refinement, we wouldn’t believe him and he wouldn’t have believed himself.  
 
It takes a hardness of language to make the hard point that you don’t just arrive at happiness, you don’t just arrive at a blissful destination and stay there.  Happiness doesn’t just happen.  It has to be prepared for, cultivated, sustained.  That’s what Aristotle meant when he said happiness was an activity, not a feeling an activity because it requires skill and focus.  Aristotle also said that although happiness is the ultimate goal of everybody’s life, it doesn’t come to us easily.  Just as one swallow does not make a spring time, he reasoned, one pleasant day does not make a whole life happy.  Being happy is something that we resolve to achieve rather than something pleasant that comes our way, like sunshine after a rain storm.  To strive for happiness doesn’t mean that you would simply like to be happy; everyone would like to be happy.  But if you imagine your life as a journey in which you are moving purposefully towards that ultimate goal, or, to use Marcus’s image, becoming happy is like winning that wrestling match.  
 
But even in lives more ordinary than those of Roman emperors, we must still wrestle for our happiness.  Think of the marriage vow or, indeed, any kind of vow; when we pledge our future and then struggle to honour that pledge.  To marry someone is to sign up for a new kind of life in the full and unsettling knowledge that this entails renouncing your past life and all possible future lives.  In choosing each other, the bride and groom forsake everyone else, as the vows say.  That is what it means to choose and they forsake all others, not just for their wedding day but for all the tomorrows that they have left together.  When couples renew their vows it’s not because the vows expired in the way that a library card expires, it’s because they want to rededicate themselves even more strongly to the vow they made all those days earlier.  The struggle to honour the vow is not the barrier to happiness, it is the happiness. 
 
Last proverb; it’s a relief to be ordinary.  The most liberating insight that philosophical and religious traditions give us, liberating because it helps us to overcome so many threatening anxieties, is that we do not have to become someone else in order to be happy.   In a way this is trivial, how can we be other than who we are?  But in a way it’s not trivial because so often we are tempted to believe that if only I married someone else, if only I had a different job, if only I lived in a different city then I would be happy.  That if only, that torments us; that is wasteful thinking.  We should not go there.  These sorts of efforts are wasteful because they squander the opportunity that is always before us not to become someone else.  That is the perverse goal of the makeover ethos or those terrible chat shows.  It’s not about becoming someone else, it’s about becoming a better version of the person you already are.  
 
Whoever we are and in what ever circumstances we face, and for most of us they will be ordinary circumstances, the possibility of happiness surrounds us.  We are always in the right place but we do our best to forget it.  Happiness has to be found in ordinary things otherwise it’s an impossibility for most people.  We make happiness in life as best we can with life as we find it; we do not import happiness from some magical elsewhere.  As Voltaire famously put in it Candide, we must make our garden grow.  Through purposeful action we become our future and find our contentment.   

Happy families are all alike, Tolstoy wrote in the famous first line of Anna Karenina.  He got it completely wrong.  The statement, I am happy, or I am unhappy, carries more objective meaning, independent of the person making the statement, because it acquires meaning only in a context, the context of your life, the context of my life.  Happiness is not an objective fact to be encountered in the world but an experience to be cultivated by each of us, so we cannot speak of a single secret of happiness applicable to everyone in the room but only of the secrets of happiness, a different one for you, a different one for me, and yet we cannot find happiness in isolation, surely a certain amount of quiet and calm reflection is necessary just to understand what happiness means but the activity of becoming happy is one that binds us to the world. 
 
Finding happiness doesn’t mean despising the world but wanting to create a better one within it and so we could say that our happiness is nested in the world, for the world is where, over a life time, we patiently build up the layers of a habitat and the sense of habit is crucial here, that we can proudly call good, and part of what makes a life worthy of being called good is that it shows compassion and care for others.  You can’t be happy just by yourself.  The happy life is one of ideals, of symbols of something higher, greater, deeper and vaster than ourselves.  It is a profoundly human need to aspire to something more and to be carried by that aspiration beyond horizon’s edge.  We want to envision something that surpasses our selfish desires, that outstrips merely personal goals and then we want to attain it.  We will, now and then, fail in our attainment but we will have learned enough to know that we are stronger than our failures.  Our life is an ever striving and we call the striving happiness.  Thank you. 
 
LL Thank you very much indeed, Professor Schoch.  I think everybody will agree that what we’ve just had is a real treat.  It has been a talk of great profundity, whether you agree with absolutely everything, but great profundity.  It has been extremely thoughtful and, perhaps even more so, extremely thought provoking.  And above all… well, not above all but in addition, as Professor Schoch rightly said about Marcus Aurelius, Professor Schoch too knows how he turneth waves [?].  We have a very little time for questions so I will throw it open now for any questions that anybody wishes to put to our lecturer.  There’s one over there.  
MF My question is, is everyone capable of happiness? 
 
PS That’s a terrific question.  I’ve approached that from two ways.  The Greeks said if you wanted to know if someone is happy, you have to ask them on their deathbed because happiness means looking back at the entirety of your life.  So, in a sense, happiness is a work in progress and if you agree with Aristotle that happiness is an activity, you become more skilled in it.  So, part of me would like to think that we get better at happiness as we get older.  That’s a very reassuring notion for those of us as we get older, I don’t think anyone in the room is getting younger.  At the same time, it also suggests something that we might not agree with, which is that children cannot be happy because, in a sense, they don’t have the kind of framework, the reflective framework, to think about their life as a whole.   
 
Children can be joyful and carefree and experience pleasures but the great philosophers would argue that children cannot be happy because they’re not, as it were, ready to think philosophically yet.  It’s only when you can start to think philosophically that you can be happy in that definition.  Not to say that children don’t have joyful experiences, they do.  So, you can agree with that, you can disagree with that but I think there is something into the idea that happiness is a skill and that, as we move through life, we do learn from experience and get more skilful, even if that means, and I think it always does, reconciling yourself with the circumstances in front of you.  I think we become more realistic as we age.  I’m not sure you’ll approve of that answer.  I think you’ll need the microphone for this. 
 
MF Just to respond to it, if I may?  People go through exactly the same circumstances, adverse circumstances, physical disabilities or economic problems or whatever, and some people don’t seem to be able to cope with them whereas others just cope very easily with them and look on to a brighter future or to greater resilience, in any way, in handling those problems whereas some people just seem to go around with a chip on their shoulder and a feeling of misery that’s all pervasive.  That’s what really lay behind my question. 
 
PS Yes, I understand that.  I suppose as a rejoinder to that I would say that happiness is not an issue, at least the way I understand it, about being optimistic or being pessimistic, it’s really about being realistic in the face of your life.  So I would still hold out, perhaps because I’m slightly pessimistic myself, that even pessimists can be happy.  I would like to believe that.  Thank you very much for the question. 
 
LL Anyone else who has any questions? 
 
MF Hello.  You mention the ordinary, you also mention the extraordinary and you also quoted Voltaire.  What is your view on Voltaire again, my Lord, give me not the gift to be extraordinary, please give me the gift only to do ordinary things extraordinarily well?  What’s your view on that, please?   
 
PS My view is that I wish I had said that first.   
 
LL Thank you.  Gentleman there. 
 
MF A lot of time people tell me life is about black and white but they should allow themselves flexibility.  [unclear].  A lot of people say to me you should be positive but it doesn’t always happen.  What do you say to that? 
 
PS That’s right, it’s not possible to be positive about all circumstances but it is possible to be realistic.  The Greek stoics said we can no more control events in the world than a sailor controls the direction of the wind.  We just have to give up that allusion of control.  The only thing we control is our attitude to the events we find.  That’s why Boethius learned that if you want to be happy the secret is in here.  It’s not the events, it’s how you relate to those events, the attitude you bring towards those events, whether it’s being positive, resilient, whatever it may call for.  I think it’s all in the attitude. 
 
LL Lady in the front there. 
 
MF I’ve always linked happiness with contentment.  What do you think about that? 
 
PS I think that’s a perfectly coherent position.  I like the fact that you haven’t linked happiness to joy because I think that’s quite a dangerous equation.  I think there is much to be said that the secret of happiness is, in a sense, being comfortable in your own skin, being in the groove of your own life and, in a sense, not wishing that you were elsewhere.  This point I was trying to make about not wishing you were someone else.  So, I have a great respect and regard for the view that happiness is really about being contented in the life that you lead in the circumstances that you find yourself in. 
 
LL Gentleman with the white hair there. 
 
MF Thank you very much.  I think after hearing your excellent delivery that perhaps we should have a new TV show, not the X-factor but the Happiness-factor and you should actually write it.   
 
PS Thank you very much. 
 
LL Lady over there. 
 
MF I so enjoyed your talk.  Could Tolstoy not have been right?  I really have always been interested in that initial quote of Anna Karenina.  Could the families he’s talking about not have got have got to that stage, as you said, individually by their own methods but be demonstrating similar qualities once they’d achieved that happier state developmentally? 
 
PS That’s interesting.  Of course, the point was not to dispute Tolstoy entirely but I would certainly agree that there are similarities in how we approach happiness and, in a sense, how happiness manifests itself, or externalizes itself, and certainly the way the bearing that we have in the world, of course there would be a great degree of communality.  We recognize when other people are happy because we recognize something of ourselves in that.  The point I was simply trying to make was that we each have our own path that will lead us eventually to this same place.  So, I completely accept what you are saying. 
 
LL I think it was, in fact, the second half of Tolstoy’s apothem which was really the crunch but anyhow I think the… was there a gentleman there who wanted to say something? 
 
MF You talked about attitude; what about going one further, how to develop that attitude especially if your life is very difficult, perhaps having dual sensory loss and it’s extremely depressing?  It can be.  For example, by practising transcendental meditation; there are 500 scientific research studies to actually show that this technique is wonderful for promoting wellbeing and happiness by reducing stress and by becoming less angry, less agitated, less frustrated, more happy, more joyful, developing compassion, courage and wisdom.  I just wondered what you had to say about these techniques because I gathered the Bhagavad Gita, which you mentioned earlier on… the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had made a very good commentary on the Bhagavad Gita which was interpreting Lord Krishna’s comments.  I was just wondering what you had to say about these wonderful techniques which do actually work and transform the individual from being perhaps brought from a negative, depressing person to a much more confident, happier person. 
 
PS Thank you for that, that’s a very insightful remark and I’m grateful to you for that.  I agree entirely.  Whether it’s cognitive behavioural therapy or mediation or some other physical exercise, there are skills and techniques in which we can become more proficient in a way we approach the world and eventually the happiness that we find.  I would endorse that entirely, absolutely no question. 
 
LL Thank you very much.  I’m afraid we have to stop there because we have a running order and we want to stick to time but thank you very, very much, Professor Schoch.  You have elicited some excellent questions, which again is a tribute to the quality of your lecture.  Thank you so much.  There will now be a ten minute break before the next lecture but could you all stay where you are and then this gives a chance for the interpreters and communicators to have a break and then we will listen with great expectation to our second lecturer.  Thank you.      
 
 
  LL Would you kindly sit down, because our second lecturer is ready to give us his lecture?  Thank you very much.  Our second speaker is, Paul Hart.  Paul, over the past 21 years has held, as many of you know, a number of posts with Sense Scotland, and has been a Principal Officer of Practice since April 1998, with a particular focus on practice issues.  He spends a lot of his time developing and delivering training courses, supporting the development of communication strategies with individuals, and thinking about new ways to support deafblind people, and people, with communication support teams. 
 
Paul is also studying for a PhD at Dundee University, with a research focus on communication development for congenitally deafblind people, and he speaks regularly at conferences and seminars across the world, including Deafblind International’s world and European conferences, on the themes of assessment, quality, communication, staff development, relationships, and sexuality.  He’s a member of Sense Scotland’s Senior Management Group.  Paul has also undertaken work on behalf of Sense International in Croatia, and Rumania, and has also hosted their professional development programme in Glasgow, which saw participants from across the world coming to Scotland for a series of seminars, and practice sharing.  So I now hand over to Paul, to give us the second lecture of the evening. 
 
PH Thank you, Lord Lawson.  I’m immensely grateful to Richard for one thing from his lecture earlier on, and that’s the confidence to sack my personal trainer, and my Botox technician, and you can see that I’ve taken that very seriously.  I think you got a huge number, many inspiring ideas in Richard’s presentation, but also a great many challenges that I think we can wrestle with, particularly when we think of them against the backdrop of deafblindness.  I’m going to bring many of Richard’s ideas into my presentation throughout this evening, but first, in answering the question, the quotation on the slide at the moment is inspired by Albert Schweitzer.  Happiness is the key to success, but what is success, health, wealth, or wisdom?   
 
In beginning to answer this, I want to share with you all a big decision that I made recently.  There may be people here in the audience who heard me speak at a conference about five years ago, when I was beginning to imagine what I thought would be my ideal life, what I thought would make me the most happy.  I concluded that what would make me happy would be to live somewhere near mountains, somewhere beside the seaside, and somewhere with a real ale pub within walking distance.  In Scotland there are countless places that could actually meet those requirements, and some years ago I actually had the opportunity to move to such a place, but I decided at that time not to move.   
 
Then more recently I did make the decision to move to a Scottish island, the island of Cumbrae, off the West Coast of Scotland, and this is a picture of Cumbrae.  The mountains in the background are on the neighbouring island, the island of Arran, but I can see them from my living room window.  And so I wanted to share with you why have I made that decision now because I think this might make me happy, and five years ago I didn’t make that decision?  Part of the answer lies with Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who lived more than 2,000 years ago, and he thought long and hard about happiness, and if you want to know more about that go on to Amazon and order Richard’s book, because it tells you some things about Epicurus. 
 
Epicurus thought, in order to be happy there are a number of things that are absolutely natural and absolutely necessary.  Friendship would be one of those things.  Freedom would be another thing, in the sense of independence, and being able to make your own decisions, have some control, and have some choice.  Thought is another essential requirement, and by that he means having the time and the space to be able to consider your own life, and to reflect on the areas that cause you anxiety, so that you can find resolutions.  And you need food, shelter, and clothes.  He also thought there were some things you might think you want, but they actually aren’t really necessary, a big house, private baths, banquets, servants, and fish and meat.  And there were some things that would actually work against your happiness, that are neither natural nor necessary: fame, and power.  They would get in the way of your happiness.   
 
In working out what is natural and necessary for you, Epicurus asks us to go through a process, a thinking process, so for me, I started this, my project for happiness.  I thought, for me, in order to be happy I need to live in a place that has mountains, the seaside, and a real ale pub nearby.  Then he says, imagine that the project is false.  Can you find any exceptions?  And so for me two questions come to mind, could I live on Mull and still not be happy, or could I be happy if I lived somewhere other than Mull?  That would then give you an idea that your original thought wasn’t a sufficient cause of your happiness.  So for me it would be possible to be miserable living on Mull if I had nobody to spend time with, or I could be happy living anywhere other than Mull, as long as I did have people to spend time with.   
 
And so I have to rewrite my project for happiness, based on that thinking process.  So for me, I could be happy living on Mull, or I could be happy living anywhere, as long as I had people to spend time with.  And that helps me to see that my true needs may now be different from my confused initial desire, so for me at that time, five years ago, happiness depended more on spending time with friends than living near the mountains, the seaside, and a real ale pub.  So Epicurus may have concluded that I shouldn’t move to Mull, and that indeed is the decision I made five years ago. 
 
Richard has highlighted some of these same issues in his presentation, and I was really struck by the power of connections and relationships that he spoke about.  And in a way this is central to why I have decided now to move to an island, with all of those fabulous possibilities, because I can see that living in a rural setting, living on this island is the first step in developing various communities that I am part of, the Edward Carpenter Community, wider friends and family, work connections.  I can see now that community can be built around this new seaside location, and that means that connections, relationships, and friendships actually come with me.  Five years ago I estimated that moving to the island would mean moving away from friendships, connections, and relationships, and five years on I can see that moving to the island actually helps build that sort of community. 
 
So it looks like there isn’t a consistency there, I have changed; something has changed in all of those years.  Richard said that there wouldn’t be one size fits all, in terms of happiness, but it’s probably that there isn’t even one thing that remains consistent for any of us, that it will be the same thing every year that will make us happy, but there is constancy in some of those ideas that I have spoken about.  I do have a need for value and purpose, and I do have a need for loving and meaningful connections with people in my life, and they are all coming with me to this new island.  And the observant amongst you will notice that it’s not yet Mull that I’ve moved to, so there is at least one extra chapter to write in my strive for happiness.  I suspect there are dozens of extra chapters to write. 
I’m going to ask you all this evening to adopt quite a wide view of friendship.  One that encompasses connection, belonging, feeling valued, making others feel valued, the fullest range of interactions that can take place between two humans.  Indeed, any close emotional contact between people, including family relationships, and if we think of friendship in that way it is quite simply the most fundamental aspect of humanity, and I look to the English writer, CS Lewis, who said that friendship is unnecessary, it’s a bit like philosophy or art, it has no survival value.  Rather, it is one of those things that give value to survival.   
 
After that short digression to share my news about my new island abode, I’m going to return to Richard’s presentation, and I was particularly struck by his three lasting truths about the pursuit of happiness.  Try to land a big fish, he said, and go for really big ideas.  Wrestle with these ideas.  Indeed, it should be a tough struggle, and the answers lie within us.  So in working out big ideas for myself to grapple with, I wish to return to some thinkers whom I have fished with many times over the years.  And I don’t mean I’ve literally fished with these people, I just mean I’ve returned constantly to their ideas time and time again, because there’s a range of really simple ideas that I think are of profound significance, and tell us some interesting things about human interactions. 
 
Although I’ve used these writers many times before, particularly in the last few years, I’m not yet going to apologise for that, because I’ve not sufficiently wrestled with their ideas enough yet.  One of those ideas, one of those great thinkers, I’ve not actually brought him into my presentation tonight, and that is, Winnie the Pooh, but I did wear a tie in his honour.  To learn about happiness, Winnie the Pooh gives you almost every answer you would need, but I will turn to a proper philosopher – as if Winnie the Pooh wasn’t – a Scottish philosopher, John Macmurray.  He says, the unit of personal existence is not the individual but two persons in personal relation.  There’s not time to fully explore what John Macmurray means, but one thing it does highlight for me is that in any analysis of interaction between humans it makes no sense to simply view one side of the exchange without reference to the other.   
 
Then we have the German philosopher, Martin Buber, and he sets out this brilliant vision where people step into relation with one another, thus contributing to the full revelation of each as a unique person.  He describes this primary word, I-you, as a way of describing that relationship that exists between people when you step into relation with them.  And he describes that relationship as one of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence, and if you just hold on to those ideas when you’re thinking of any of the support that you give to people, or any of the relationships and connections you have with people, is it an I-you type relationship?  I will come back to this idea later. 
 
But I’m going to turn now to the wonderful Canadian writer, Judith Snow, and she builds on some of these ideas from Martin Buber, and she describes this really beautiful image of human life as just with a thread floating between and connecting bodies, giving each body the capacity to be a person.  She suggests, if you’re alone then you are alive but you’re not revealed or fulfilled, but if you come into contact with even one person then new qualities will develop within you.  If you come into a relationship with two people that means even more of the real you is revealed, and as individual relationships increase in number and diversity there are increased possibilities for that person to become themselves, and to draw forth new capacity in others.  And she says, in other words, one or two threads will offer little support, but a gossamer network of even five or six threads a strength to sustain a rich life.  And you can keep in mind that word rich. 
 
So I take all of these ideas to mean that it is only by being willing to step into relation with others that aspects of both the real I and the real you can be revealed, and I cannot know who I am except through the direct connections I have with others.  So think now of all the relationships that are in your life, and how those various people might connect, because it is those connections that hold you together and give you a sense of purpose, and sense of identity, in the way that Judith Snow describes.  [Asides]  So for me, I can be a son, a brother, an uncle, a cousin, a nephew, a friend, a lover, an employee, a colleague.  A friend at work, or on the football pitch, in the pub, up those mountains, or on that beach, and in some respects, for some of those roles I don’t really have to do anything.  Because my niece was born I become an uncle, because my sister is born I become a brother.   
 
But I can decide to play those roles in particular ways, for example, uncles do particular things.  It used to just be taking nieces and nephews to the cinema, on a camping trip, or playing a game of chess.  Now it also includes going for a pint, but I haven’t yet persuaded my eldest nephew to the delights of real ale, and that’s a constant struggle for happiness on my part.  I have still much to do there!  In doing all of these activities with my nieces and nephews, I feel able both to give and to receive value, and the same would be true for any of the other roles that I’ve mentioned earlier.  Then this makes me think about people I am in a professional relationship with, and here I am principally thinking of people with congenital deafblindness.   
 
If they are already uncles do they get to do uncle-type things?  If they are already sisters do they get to act just as sisters, or if they are sons do they get to be sons?  Then we could ask, are there sufficient opportunities for people to play some of the other roles in life that I mentioned before?  Could they be friends, lovers, artists, or sportswomen?  And then what of people who become deafblind later in life?  What if someone’s vision or hearing changes much later in life?  If they are wives or husbands just now do they get still to be wives and husbands, and how does deafblindness impact on their identity, as well as connections with other people in their life?  If they have partners, do those partners still get to be wives or husbands?  These are not all questions for me to answer, but nevertheless, I think they are important questions to ask.  Indeed, important questions to wrestle with. 
 
If I really believe what Judith Snow and others tell me, that any major change in our lives will bring both exciting challenges as well as difficult challenges.  New situations and new contexts will mean that we can find out new aspects of ourselves, and consequently other people in our lives will find new aspects of themselves also.  This could be exciting in the strive for happiness, but these new situations and new contexts also mean that the important relationships in our lives will have changed.  Important activities that provided value and purpose may also have changed, and indeed, our very sense of identity may have changed. 
 
Richard told us earlier that happiness lies within us.  We should strive to become, not someone else but a better version of the person we already are, and I would largely agree with that.  But additionally, if we blend some of those ideas we’ve been discussing around connections with Richard’s idea that the activity of becoming happy is one that binds us to the world, then the place to look for happiness, indeed the place to cultivate happiness is at the meeting place between people.  Happiness is to be found in the relationships and the connections that we have with people in our lives.   
 
Perhaps also people who are yet to be in our lives, because in reaching out for connections with everyone in our world, we could ask ourselves what capacities does this person help draw out of me, and which authentic parts of me are they already revealing?  But the flip side of that would be if there are people in our lives who we struggle to reach out to connect with, then we must ask what capacities and authentic parts of me are consequently being diminished?  And if I haven’t yet revealed my full capacities, if I have not yet discovered my authentic identity, I wonder if I can ever really be happy, and that’s another difficult question perhaps to wrestle with. 
 
I’m going to go back to Judith Snow, and think of this two-way process of human interaction, and I want to consider it for a moment against the backdrop of those early moments in life when any of us learned about being a human.  Many of you here will be familiar with videos of tiny babies, some only ten minutes old, who can do marvellous things with big people in their lives.  They can imitate anything, almost, that an adult will do.  If a dad sticks out his tongue a baby can stick out its tongue.  If a dad yawns a baby will yawn, if a dad or a mum wiggles their hands, wiggles their feet, babies can follow these things.  I’m not going to go into great detail on imitation, otherwise we will be here until way after midnight, but I do wish to consider one particular aspect of it.   
 
And look to a psychologist, Andy Meltzoff, who suggests that when babies are interacting with others through imitation, they are learning that the other person is not an alien but a kindred spirit.  Not an it, but an embryonic you, and this is one of the really fabulous outcomes of imitation, it allows the infant to see the adult as just like me.  But we can see that same thing happening in interactions between congenitally deafblind adults and their communication partners.  And imagine what it must feel like for a congenital deafblind person, maybe after years of living in a long stay hospital, with not much social interaction, and if someone gives you an imitative response.  In that moment you will experience yourself as an I, and that must be profoundly life changing.   

But the real magic of imitation, I think happens when the deafblind person is revealed as a you, for the communication partner, and maybe endowing the deafblind person with a humanity that is often rendered invisible.  This is no longer an it in front of you this is a you, a fellow human being, someone equal to you.  So imitation is serving the same purpose for a communication partner as it serves for an infant in those early moments of life, it shows the other person to be just like me.   
 
I’m going to move for a minute, to think of some work that’s happening in St Andrews University.  Two colleagues, Maggie Ellis, and Doctor Arlene Estell have been undertaking some research, really powerful, moving research, using imitation with older people with dementia.  They’ve built their ideas on some of the findings from so-called still face experiments.  Those are the experiments done with infants and children, where it can be seen that if you interrupt the normal patterns of interaction, or if the partner [parent?] doesn’t respond to the infant the infant will become very distressed, and after a while become very, very passive.  So they built their ideas on this work, and also on the work of the 19th Century and early 20th Century American psychologist, William James.   
 
He developed an idea that the worst fate to befall a human being would be to wander around in the world completely unnoticed, never a single person ever paying you any attention.  In Judith Snow’s terms, such a person would be alive but certainly not revealed, and the work that Ellis and Estell have undertaken is incredibly moving, and helps us to see that even if language and memory become difficult, the human mind is still willing to make connections with other minds.  This desire to be in touch with other people remains profoundly strong, but it takes a partner who is willing to see this other older person in front of them as a you, and not an it. 
 
And I was interested in an idea, a really simple idea that was outlined by the Danish psychologist, Jesper Dammeyer at the recent Deafblind International Conference in Italy.  He outlined this formula that is striking in its simplicity, but profound in its implications.  He said, as any of us get older our continued cognitive abilities are reliant on good communication, and good communication is reliant on skilled communication partners.  It’s incredibly straightforward.  Now I’ll give you some figures taken from Deafblind Scotland’s website a few years ago.  There are an estimated 5,000 deafblind people living in Scotland, and in England you can multiply that by ten to get the figure for here.   
 
Deafblind Scotland has 700 members, and at Sense Scotland we support 600 adults and children, and maybe around 200 of them will be congenitally deafblind, so you can add up the figures.  Out of that 500 maybe around 1,000 receive regular support, and of the others, many of them will be living with families, and being well supported and well communicated with.  But it does beg a question that how many of that 5,000 in Scotland, or how many of that 50,000 in England will be at home, or living in a nursing home, seen just as elderly, not able to be communicated with, not really seen as a you?  Alive, but not revealed – where has any consideration of their happiness gone?  If we look back 25 years in Scotland, and it would have been the same in England, many of the adults with congenital deafblindness that we support in Scotland would have been in long stay hospital wards.  Again, where would the consideration of their happiness have been at that time?   
 
In Australia there is a professional in the field of intellectual disability, a woman called, Jani Klotz.  She herself is the sister of three siblings with learning difficulties, and she gives us some additional guidance about really understanding how other people perceive the world, and how to step into relation with them.  She is thinking in this quotation that I’m going to give you, of people with intellectual disability, but I think we could think of any person at all that you meet on your journey through life.  She says that what people need more than anything else is just to be accepted, and respected as they are.  The aim of us all who engage with them should be to support who they are, to provide the support so they can be who they are, and to interact with them in such a way that their ways of being are appreciated and nurtured, rather than undermined and dismissed.  What this requires is stretching our rules of engagement and intimacy.  I’ll come back to engagement and intimacy in a few minutes. 
 
Because in really accepting who people are, we really need to strive to find out what their interests are, to understand their ways of being in the world, and whenever possible we should meet these interests through as wide a range of activities as possible.  I’ll show you a few slides.  This is Brian, a deafblind man let loose with a power tool in the art room.  This is also Brian in another art session, with Karen, one of our art workers.  This is a scene from a youth project, a friendships project that we organised in Scotland two years ago.  It was called Getting Together, and it was just designed to bring young folk together to develop social connections, to develop friendships, and possibly develop relationships beyond that.  And it’s always as sunny as that in Glasgow. 
 
This is the same group having their lunch.  This is part of a drama activity.  We used the parachute quite a lot, just for fun and games, but we also used it as a signifier for the lunch, and after a while when the parachute was put down on the ground people knew that it was lunchtime.  This is me working with Steven.  You’ll see Steven later on, exploring a Rodin sculpture, and we did a drama session where we became statues and recreated some of those sculptures, and this is my impression of a Rodin.  That’s the youth group, out and about at one of our galleries.  This is Steven exploring the Rodin.  We got special permission from the Burrell Collection, as long as we had fancy blue gloves, to be able to explore all the exhibits.  It was partly a project about body awareness.   
 
This is the great outdoors, and Peter and Joe having their coffee in a local forest.  Stuart, off at an animal sanctuary, feeling a bird.  Another art session.  Art has become a really important activity within Sense Scotland.  This is a camping trip.  The plan was that we would all stay in that tepee, which is next to us.  It sleeps 12, but the weather turned out to be spectacular, since it’s always sunny in Scotland, and instead we decided to sleep beside the campfire, just under the stars.  The empty sleeping bag place that you can just see on the end there is where I slept for the night.  The deafblind people were under the canvas, the staff were out of the canvas, and it was a glorious night, until five in the morning when it started to rain.  This is Robert waking me up in the morning, and that was such a lovely morning, because Robert woke up with this incredible laughter, and it was just as if he had woken up and thought, that’s the most bizarre night I have ever had.  No bed, no bath, no shower, no nothing, I’m sleeping outside, and I don’t get this, but it was wonderful.   
 
So if we remember what Jani Klotz said, we need to stretch our rules of engagement and intimacy, and in some of the photographs I have just shown you there is real physical proximity between the staff and the congenitally deafblind people.  This has profound challenges for professional relationships, and I was reminded of this again at the recent DBI Conference in Italy.  We showed a DVD that the Deafblind International Tactile Communication Network is developing, and it’s all around touch and tactile communication.  In the audience discussion afterwards someone said that the level of intimacy and physical proximity that was evident in the DVD could not happen in their school, or in their country.  She said that that level of physical proximity would be discouraged, not even not encouraged.  But we know that without physical contact communication with a congenitally deafblind person, or even an acquired deafblind person, is impossible. 
 
I want to go back to Richard’s story about the married couple, each of who makes vows to commit to one another, and this made me think about the types of relationships that exist between professionals and the people they are supporting.  I wonder how many times that the vows made by each person are unequal, and different?  As a professional, I might understand that there are laws, policies, and local arrangements that discourage relationships from developing in particular ways.  These are well-discussed and articulated, as part of any professional development, but are they equally discussed and articulated for the person at the other side of the professional boundary?   
 
What happens if a person I am supporting is more committed to me than I am to them, because I have another life?  What happens if it is primarily staff and other paid people, who are in a deafblind person’s life?  Is it wrong that the deafblind person might then make a deep and personal connection with that worker?  Indeed, even fall in love?  What role is it that professionals really play in someone’s life?  Are they knights in shining armour, or are they supposed to offer support, and then quickly disappear from a person’s life?  What does it mean to be part of the Sense family?  Is this a lifelong commitment, just as it is in any other family? 
 
I have no answers at all to these questions, so you can’t ask awkward questions later, but I am aware that sometimes these are issues.  To go back to Richard’s idea, from earlier, these are issues that we have danced with over the years, and I think it’s now time to wrestle with these ideas.  They are not easy questions to ask, let alone answer, and actually, most of them are not my questions.  They are Megan Mann’s questions, and she is really keen to wrestle with these ideas, as is Liz Duncan, and indeed, Colin Anderson, when he’s not taking photographs, will want to wrestle with these questions.  And if you too want to wrestle with these questions then come and join us in some of those debates.  I think, Sense has some articles and some discussions planned over the coming months, and years, and I think they are important questions. 
 
Sense Scotland, we’ve been working in the arts for more than 20 years, and through the development of often innovative art practices, we have seen some fantastic results.  It was no surprise therefore that I showed many images earlier, of the arts, music, and drama, but also outdoor education, sport, and everyday leisure activities, because these all support the development of our humanity.  It’s really, really hard to be involved in a music session and not feel the emotion of that.  And if you’re up a rock face with a deafblind person and one of you slips it’s really hard not to feel real fear, or real emotion, and the point when humans open up emotionally is the point when communication can rush in and fill that gap.  Without emotion nothing much else is going to happen. 
 
I’m going to introduce a short detour into my presentation here, to highlight the story of two 25-year-olds, who met for the first time in 1988.  Both had dreams and ambitions of being rock stars.  Both wanted to own really big electric keyboards, both wanted to write their own songs, and play their music in gigs around the country.  One of them did, Lewis.  He’s just recently come out of the studio, having spent a week there, having been given a grant by the Scottish Arts Council, and he’s made his fourth CD of his own improvised music.  The other 25-year-old, you would probably have guessed, is standing in front of you, and hasn’t quite yet made the big time.  But Epicurus also told us that fame and fortune are unnecessary for being happy, so maybe it’s all for the best.   
 
But it is true that Lewis gets an enormous sense of value and purpose from his music, and his art career, and it becomes a really crucial part of his identity.  Because being involved in activities that we really enjoy helps to develop our social networks, and in turn those social networks help us to develop a sense of who we are.  And I want you to think how complex and challenging that might be in the context of inclusion.  I’ll go back to my nieces and nephews.  They may have met their friends at school, but they sustain those friendships out of school, through texting, social networking on computers, meeting up for activities, or even just hanging around on a street corner.  It is relatively easy to include the children and young people that we support, in schools and other similar settings, but how many services could easily get funding to help young people achieve real inclusion, so that they can sustain their friendships out of schools, and through these friendships develop their identity and self-esteem?   

Could you get funding to go to a nightclub, to shop only for pleasure, to eat out with friends, to hang around on a street corner, or just to pop round to a friend’s house?  I’m not sure.  It’s not so easy in Scotland.  It might be easy here.  And there are real parallels, I think there, in providing communicator guide support to people with acquired deafblindness.  It would be relatively easy, but only relatively easy, if we look at the figures from before, to get support to do your weekly grocery shopping, or to go for a trip to the bank.  But would it be so easy to convince a funding authority to provide a communicator guide to pop round to visit your friends, to have a riotous night out in the pub, or to host an evening party in your own home?  We’ll soon be exhausted with all of this wrestling. 
 
We have become increasingly interested in the last few years, in Scotland, and this poster is published by the UK Mental Health Foundation.  I’ll talk you through it in a minute.  The poster aims to illustrate steps that any of us could take to minimise or avoid mental illness, but its sentiments are very close to the ideas that we’re thinking about this evening.  It suggests ten things.  Talk about your feelings, keep active, eat well, drink sensibly – and that means stick only to real ale.  Keep in touch with friends and loved ones, ask for help, take a break, do something you’re good at, accept who you are, and care for others.  Bound [?] to the world, almost, in the way that Richard described.  So, in beginning to think about is it health, wealth, or wisdom, we can adopt a wide view of health as something that encompasses all of the ideas expressed in this poster.  
 
 It is not just the absence of illness, but it is having people in our lives that we can talk to, people to share food and drink with, people to ask for help, people to look after, people we can have a break with, and people we can keep active with, through a range of activities that we enjoy and are good at.  And if we combine those same ideas with Epicurus’ statements about the necessity of friendships, freedom, thought, food, shelter, and clothes, then we can work towards some conclusions about a wealthy life.  A rich person is one who has food, shelter, and clothes, for sure, but thereafter it is someone who has value and purpose.  Someone with an ability to participate in activities that provide friendships, connections, intimacy, and identity, and someone whose life, although connected intimately to the lives of others, has a degree of autonomy and choice, with sufficient time to reflect on our experiences. 
 
Okay, I’m going to unfold the full quotation from Albert Schweitzer.  He said, success is not the key to happiness; happiness is the key to success.  If you love what you are doing you will be successful.  And so we could ask ourselves, do we love what we’re doing?  Or if we reject the idea of doing and in its place think of being, maybe we should put the question another way.  If you love who you are you will be successful.  The only thing any of us really have to do in our lives is simply be.  Be true to ourselves, be ourselves in the way that Richard described earlier, and to be a human being and to interact with other human beings.  How we choose to be, however, that is the key to our happiness and our success, and for me that’s where the wisdom perhaps comes in.   
 
To know that life is about being yourself, but knowing also that you are part of something bigger, and this helps us to return full circle to the ideas from Judith Snow and Martin Buber, from earlier.  And Albert Schweitzer put it much more poetically, just as the wave cannot exist for itself but is ever part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.  And for me this is what leads to real happiness, a willingness to accept who you are, and then step into relation with others in a way that really, really accepts them for the individual they are, allowing the full revelation of their unique creative gifts, allowing them just to be. 
 
So where before we could have seen the tragedy of difference, whether this be deafblindness, any other disability, any sexuality, a different religion, a different colour of skin, because in seeing difference we might have imagined those people to have lesser stories, not belonging to my group, not connected to me, now instead we can see the miracle of difference.  Because difference gives us the opportunity to listen to new stories, to belong to more groups, to make more connections, and doing so I become healthier, wealthier, and wiser.  My full capacities as an individual inhabitant of this planet get fully revealed, and in this process I can further strive and struggle for happiness. 
 
I’ll finish with one last quote from Epicurus, as we come towards the end of the evening, and you’re heading out there for your pint, or your drink of real ale.  Epicurus says, and I have slightly changed his words, but he says, when you’re thinking of your next drink don’t think what you will drink but rather who you will drink it with.  Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. 
 
LL Thank you very much indeed, Paul.  I think you’ll all agree we’ve had another excellent talk, another extremely thoughtful talk, of a very different kind from the professors here, but nevertheless, they go together very well indeed, and I was struck, I must say.  I know very little of this, but I was struck, as Paul was talking, by the thought of what a wonderful job people like him do, who help the deafblind.  I think it’s a marvellous thing.  Anyhow, we have a little time again for questions, so who would like to ask the first question?  You told them they mustn’t ask questions.  That’s why.  But there is one over there, at the back by the wall. 
 
MF I can’t speak as a professional, because I never have been a professional, but from the volunteer aspect I would just like, please, to ask, do you agree or disagree with this?  Sympathy helps open a door.  Empathy, you go through the door with them.  Think on that.  
 
PH I think you made a contribution earlier, as well.  More wise words.  I wouldn’t disagree at all with what you said.  I think sympathy wouldn’t be the thing that is useful to last for a very long time.  Yes, so as you say, it gets you started. 
 
LL I think there was one…  That’s right, the lady there. 
 
MF Speaking as a deafblind person, an acquired deafblind person rapidly ageing, my problem is not finding happiness but clinging to what I’ve got.  It’s difficult, because less and less people want to interact with me, even if I want to interact with them.  I live by the sea, I can see the mountains, and I have [?] real ale, but what will happen when I get older and older and that is taken away from me, as it inevitably could be?  So it’s being able to cling to the things that have made me happy and still hold on to them that is the problem. 
 
PH I think that’s one of the difficult areas that I highlighted, where I think we still need to wrestle and still need to think more creatively.  I think the numbers that I put up were deliberately designed to try to help us see that the need for connections continues, and indeed perhaps grows, as any of us become older in life.  And I think hanging on to the activities, the connections, the people, the relationships in your life, is a constant thing for any of us in life.   
 
And how we handle any change that’s happening to us, I think will have a real impact on our continued happiness, but if I really believe the things that I speak about and I’ve spoken about today, this is a constant two-way process.  The relationships, the happiness lies at the meeting place between individuals, and I put up those numbers before, because it becomes incumbent upon all of us to make sure that connections and communication continue to happen for any of us as we go through life. 
 
LL The lady over there. 
 
MF I feel very strongly about that, because it’s to do with the relationship side of things, and it’s what makes that relationship.  I feel happiness is contagious.  I hate to have to admit this in front of this group of people, but I love Ken Dodd.  He tickles me with his tickle stick.  He really does.  He doesn’t have to say anything, but you see him come on, with his strange costume, and he is happy, and immediately I find my happy bubbles coming up.  I think it is to do with that connection with people, and I feel so sad at times that sometimes there are blocks in our way, in terms of the connection with people, children, acquired deafblind people, it doesn’t matter who it is. 
 
I’m reminded of working with a much older deafblind lady, 89 years of age, profoundly deafblind, kneeling on the floor, my arms around her waist, in a position that I think would horrify some people, but trying to just make that connection.  And at one point I laughed at something, and she laughed, and she said, Megan, you’re having a belly laugh, and I thought, how wonderful.  She just laughed, and she had no idea what the joke was, but I thought, we’ve made a happy connection.  But I think, what is it that we need to do to get the balance between what needs to be there to safeguard people, but actually what naturally happens between people, just being together, having a laugh, being silly, with children or adults, doesn’t matter what it is?  Paul, how do we get that balance? 
 
PH I have no idea.  I honestly don’t have an answer to that yet, and Sarah Butler and I were chatting this afternoon, in relation to some work that Sense is wanting to do over these next few weeks, months, and indeed years, to really wrestle with these ideas.  I think, deafblindness, and I’m thinking primarily of congenital deafblindness because that is my experience, the communication requires a level of physical and emotional closeness between two people that blurs at the edge of professional boundaries.  Over the years, Sense, and Sense Scotland, and other organisations, I think have engaged in this way, and I think we’ve done some really, really exciting things, and some tremendous work.   
 
I think we do need to think further, and I do think now we need to wrestle at the next stage, and wrestle at the next level, and begin to work with deafblind people and ask, how does this touch and how does this level of physical and emotional intimacy impact upon you?  Not just to worry about the professional relationship, but to think also about the relationship of both people in this partnership together.  I’ll make one other comment that is slightly more frivolous, but I think you can learn lots in a lecture like this, that Megan’s main inspiration is Ken Dodd, and my main inspiration is Winnie the Pooh!  
 
LL Thank you very much.  I think that’s a wonderful note on which to end, but just if I may make one observation?  Relationships are of the first importance in life, and I think, as one gets older they become more important, not less important.  One of the things, which I think for many of us is perhaps the most important relationship of all, is the relationship one has with one’s children, and with one’s grandchildren.  I think that can give a whole lot of meaning for many people.  Not to everybody, obviously, but for many people that can give a whole lot of meaning to life, and it becomes, as I say, the more important the older you get.  
 
We have a tremendous lot of food for thought, and one of the great things about food for thought is you don’t put on any weight, you can have as much of it as you like!  You may want to have a little bit more, and if you want to have a little bit more, I suggest that those of you who have the privilege of being able to, read the lectures at your leisure.  The transcripts will be available on the Sense website on Friday, and thereafter.  So the very best of luck to all of you, and I now call on John Crabtree, the Chairman of this organisation.  I don’t know why nowadays they call him a chair, he’s not a piece of furniture, but anyway, he is now going to wrap it up. 
 
JC I am a chair, in a sense, the Chairman of Sense, as well.  I probably thought I was going to say lots of things now but to be honest with you, I found myself thinking during this evening that you are all very different than me, because you all accepted an invitation to come tonight, whereas I didn’t, it was just in my diary.  I was told months ago, without even realising it, I had to be here tonight, so when today came here I am.  And as I was sitting here this evening I couldn’t help reminding myself.  Again, I got asked upstairs, how did you get involved in Sense, why are you involved in Sense, and the answer is always the same, it’s just a fantastic privilege. 
 
I’ve had a wonderful evening.  I really, genuinely have.  For me it was duty that I came along to the Sense evening, but it’s been terrific, and I’ve heard every single word, and I’m going to take a lot away from it.  I’m naturally a bit trivial, so it’s easier for me to say, well, I’m on a personal journey from Plato to Prozac, and I’ll end up in a Scottish pub, probably, if I’m lucky.  But actually, it’s been a lot more profound that that, hasn’t it?  It’s been quite exceptional, so if I may say, I think the Sense team has done a terrific job and I’d like to thank them from all of us for putting this night together.  You’ll understand why I’m so happy, fulfilled, and content that I’m the Chair of Sense, because it’s just a terrific thing to do, and a great thing to be involved with, and they are great people, so I’ll start by thanking the team that put tonight together. 
 
Then of course, if it had just been us it wouldn’t have been very good, so actually, it’s been excellent because of these three gentlemen here.  We’ve got things for them, haven’t we, so I’ve got my lovely assistant here, who is going to bring…  Who am I doing?  I’m doing Paul and Richard first.  This is what you wanted, I think.  It’s a very small bottle of real ale, as you can see.  And our Chair, Lord Lawson, we’ve been very privileged to have him with us.  Lastly, can I thank all of you?  You asked amazingly intelligent questions, and I was inspired by the questions almost as much as I was by the talk.  I couldn’t have thought of any of those questions.  So I hope our Chair thinks we’re a pretty sophisticated, well-organised, well-behaved lot. 
 
LL I’m very impressed, yes. 
 
JC Excellent, the best face of Sense has been put forward.  Thank you very much all of you for coming, have a safe journey home, and do come next year.  This is an annual event now, isn’t it, and we’ll put it on the website when it’s ready, so keep an eye out for it.  Okay, thank you.