The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas, Day Two

On the second day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me:

Two Things You're Needing
And a Fat Guy in a Sweet T

We live in a frantic, whirling, world at a particularly vexing time. Our oceans are rising, our politics are infuriating, our kids are growing up too fast, OUR PETS' HEADS ARE FALLING OFF! It's been a theme of this blog this year that things are generally shitty, relatively speaking, and that we're still really blessed dudes and dudettes.

Gheorghemas reminds us that Gheorghe: The Blog itself is a key to maintaining connection, that being part of a community, no matter how silly or inconsequential to the broader world is good for one's soul.

Now, courtesy of researchers at Harvard University, the William & Mary of the North, we know that there are two other things vital to happiness and health. One might seem self-evident, while the other is a bit more nuanced.

The Grant and Glueck study has tracked two separate populations of men for more than 75 years. The Grant study has followed 456 poor men growing in the Boston area from 1939 to 2014, while the companion Glueck study focused on 268 male Harvard graduates from 1939 to 1944.

The major finding, according to Robert Waldinger, who directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, is that relationships matter. “It’s not just the number of friends you have, and it’s not whether or not you’re in a committed relationship. It’s the quality of your close relationships that matters.”

George Vaillant, director of the study from 1972 to 2004 explains the definition of quality, and provides us with the two gifts Big Gheorghe offers us, saying, "“One [key] is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”

That first element, as noted above, seems obvious. Love is all you need, as the Beatles told us. But it stops me cold to think too hard about the second. Like most of you, I'm no stranger to stress - especially at the moment. My general stress response is to withdraw, brood, and become prickly. Pushing love away, you might say. Shouldn't have taken Harvard to tell me that's a bad idea.

So my Gheorghemas resolution (new thing!) is to take a deeper breath, and focus on drawing love and friendship close instead of pushing it away. We'll give Dr. Waldinger the last word on this subject:

"The good life is built with good relationships."

Love you guys. Happy Gheorghemas. And I look very much forward to seeing several of you later today.