Pushkin

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught many of us a lot about what we need to do to live a happier life.

And the biggest thing that many of us have missed is all the social stuff, those little family, friendship and relationship traditions,

going bowling on your boyfriend's birthday, or that monthly sit-down dinner at grandma's, or Friday night drinks with your work buddies.

Many of us have also missed all those public events that were obliged to attend. They've all been changed or canceled.

I've seen this firsthand as a professor and head of college here at Yale. Those time-honored Ivy League commencement rituals that have been practiced for hundreds of years, they all got axed last year.

If you had asked me before the pandemic, I might not have thought of that as such a bad thing. I mean, graduation rituals can be a bit dorky.

But what have many of us realized over the last year? It turns out we really missed this stuff.

Now, I am not a pomp and circumstance kind of person, but these rituals have a way of making you feel more connected, like you're a real part of family or community, like you're a bit less out of step with life.

But another reason I started to appreciate all these formal rituals was because of a class I stumbled on during COVID.

Can you sing that song? I cannot sing it as well as you can.

Well, shall we sing it together?

It's a free online class from my alma mater Harvard, called China X, taught by the amazing Peter Bull. The Charles H. Carlzwell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations.

Let China sleep, the mighty Napoleon is supposed to have said in a cautious moment at the turn into the 19th century, but when China awakens, she will shake the world.

As I listened to Peter's China X lectures, it became clear that my present day situation was also the preoccupation of a great Chinese thinker, one who lived more than 2000 years ago. Confucius.

And so welcome again to happiness lessons of the ancients, with me, Dr. Larry Santos.

I can't recommend Peter Bull's China X class enough. I'm a huge Peter Bull fan girl. I was totally blown away when he told me he'd taken the time to go back through the teachings of Confucius to see what the great philosopher had to say about my field of study, happiness.

It's hard to overstate how important Confuciuses in China, because ideas are less well known elsewhere. So I asked Peter to start us off with Confucius 101.

So let's place them in time, which is around 500 pieces, which is also around 500 years after the founding of the Joe dynasty.

And so these histories organized by dynasties when there's a particular ruling house on the throne. And at a moment when all of these smaller states that the dynasty supposedly is in charge of are beginning to fight with each other and make claims on each other.

The nominal king, Joe King has lost power. And so the local lords are after it. And of course, once the Lord of your state is after power, these of the other states, then his underlings are seeking power from each other and it just goes all the way down.

And so we know that the world Confucius is we know of no thinker, no one who's thinking about values who's thinking about the human condition in the same way before Confucius. He's the first.

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