C4| Saturday/Sunday, February 29 - March 1, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
what limited. But I remembered
that James was dear friends with
the Polish philosopher Wincenty
Lutoslawski, who was a complete
yoga fanatic. James once wrote to
him that “the Yoga discipline [may
be a] methodical way of waking up
deeper levels of will power than
are habitually used, and thereby in-
creasing an individual’s vital tone
and energy.” Many people—my ex-wives included—have suggested
that I give yoga a shot. “It’ll really
calm you down,” they’d say. I usu-
ally just pictured myself in a sa-
rong, sitting in the lotus position,
seething. No thanks.
At its base, however, yoga is
very simple. Just breathe and act.
“Smooth the brow, brighten the
eye, contract the dorsal rather than
the ventral aspect of the body”:
James’s words from the “Princi-
ples” could be the cues for the ba-
sic sun salutation in most forms of
Vinyasa yoga.
“Just try it, John.” This time I
heeded that voice, my better judg-
ment. Calm your face, stand
straight with your chest out and
shoulders squared. Now bend at
the waist, place your hands on the
floor and step back so that your
body is a stiff plank. Lower the
plank to the ground. Now look up,
way up. Contract your gut muscleslike you are laughing and stick your
butt in the air so your body makes
an upside-down “V.” This is “down-
ward-facing dog.” Hang out here
for a few breaths and let the fresh
blood rush to your head. Relax your
face. Relax. Now step your feet to
your hands and use every single
one of those dorsal muscles to
stand up from the waist. Raise your
hands and look up like your life de-
pends on it. Repeat the whole cy-
cle. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
By the fourth salutation I was
drenched in my own juices. This
prescribed set of bodily movements
had done something to my emo-
tional malaise. Things were defi-
nitely looking up. A student is only
supposed to do a few sun saluta-
tions, but I was hooked. On the first
day I did several dozen, enough to
lose count. They were horrible-
looking, I’m sure. But standing up
straight, repeatedly, was curative
and strangely addictive.
Over the last three months, yoga
has become a habit for me. But it is
also a type of emotional and physi-
cal spring training for the rest of
my life. “Everybody should do at
least two things each day that he
hates to do, just for practice,”
James instructs.
Standing upside down on your
forearms is hard. Being in love for
a decade is harder. Watching your
love story disintegrate and raising
a child in the process is harder still.
Genuine recovery—-the type that
lets you love again—is the hardest.
Better get some practice.
When we face a moment that
tempts us to retreat, to succumb to
inactivity, to allow external forces
to rule our days, James quietly
urges, “Be not afraid of life.” We
can behave in ways that deliver us,
almost without us realizing it, to
narcissism and self-destruction. Or
we can actively form habits that
teach us to risk ourselves, to fall,
and then to use our dorsal muscles
to stand up straight once again. As
James knew, “Actions do not al-
ways bring happiness, but there is
no happiness without action.”Mr. Kaag is a professor of philos-
ophy at the University of Massa-
chusetts, Lowell. This essay is
adapted from his new book, “Sick
Souls, Healthy Minds: How Wil-
liam James Can Save Your Life,”
which will be published on March
17 by Princeton University Press.Leap Years and
Other Cyclical
Oddities
W
e have reached
the time of year
where optimism
goes to die. The
snow descends,
New Year’s resolutions are a dis-
tant memory and now an awful
disease preoccupies the world. At
moments like this I tend to crawl
into a dark yet comfortable place
and remain there for as long as
possible. But according to William
James, the founder of psychology
in the U.S., I really shouldn’t.
In James’s 1890 book “Principles
of Psychology,” he explains that
most human feelings aren’t just in
our heads, so to speak. Our emo-
tions are tightly bound to our ac-
tions and bodily states. For most of
my life, I thought that when I was
wallowing around my messy house,
or failing to get out of bed, it was
because I was depressed. James
suggests it is the other way
around: I feel sad because I con-
stantly look down at my shoes
while in public, because I keep my
house dimly lit and cramped. In his
words, “We don’t laugh because
we’re happy, we’re happy because
we laugh.”
This is the core of what became
known as the James-Lange theory
of emotion, after James and the
Danish physiologist Carl Lange,
who proposed the same idea inde-
pendently. James held that an emo-
tion devoid of expression and prac-
tical consequences is largely
meaningless. “If we fancy some
strong emotion, and then try to ab-
stract from our consciousness of it
all the feelings of its bodily symp-
toms, we find that we have nothing
left behind.... Can one fancy the
state of rage and picture ... no
flushing of the face, no dilation of
the nostrils, no clenching of the
teeth?”
By the same token, James be-
lieved that our actions can radically
alter our inner landscape. “Panic is
increased by flight,” he writes;
“sobbing makes ... sorrow more
acute,” and “in rage ... we work
ourselves up ... by repeated out-
breaks.” It follows that refusing to
express an emotion is the first step
in letting it pass. This is different
from simply repressing our feel-
ings: Clenching your teeth is a
surefire way to get much, much an-
grier. James’s point is that it is
usually possible to act in ways that
guide our emotions.
This winter—as I slogged
through a second divorce at the
tender age of 40, recovered from a
second heart attack and lamented
the state of the world—I reread
James’s “Principles.” After a thou-
sand pages I took home a single
conclusion. “Sit all day in a moping
posture,” James writes, “sigh, and
reply to everything with a dismal
voice, and your melancholy lin-
gers.... [S]mooth your brow,
brighten your eye, contract the
dorsal rather than the ventral as-
pect of the frame ... and your heart
must be frigid indeed if not to gen-
erally thaw!” He’s telling us to act
differently, to do something, even if
it’s the last thing we want to do.
Get the blood flowing. Inactivity is
the enemy.
Given my health, my options for
activity were, and remain, some-BYJOHNKAAGEVERYDAYMATH
EUGENIA CHENG
TOMASZ WALENTA
LEAP YEARS CANlead
to strange situations. If
you were born on Feb.
29, 1996, for instance,
this year you will be
celebrating your sixth birthday, even
though you’re 24.
Leap years occur because the
daily cycle of the earth spinning on
its axis doesn’t quite match up with
the yearly cycle of the earth orbiting
the sun. While we count 365 days in
a year, the time between vernal equi-
noxes is actually around 365 days
and six hours. That means every four
calendar years we accumulate a day
of inaccuracy, which is why we insert
February 29 to correct it.
However, the solar year isn’t ex-
actly 365.25 days. It’s actually
365.24217 days, which means that
every 100 years, we need to correct
the calendar in the opposite direc-
tion by skipping the leap year—as
happened in 1900 and will happen
again in 2100.
But skipping the leap year every
100 years only gives us an average of
365.24 days a year, which means that
after a few hundred years, we’ll be a
day off again. That’s why every 400
years we put a leap day back in—as
we did in 2000, which had 366 days.
That way, the length of the year av-
erages 365.2425, which is pretty
close to the correct value.
Cycles that don’t match up are all
around us. My sleep cycle seems to
be slightly longer than 24 hours, so
that I’m liable to go to bed later and
later until I need an alarm clock to
wake up. In music, a cycle of 12 in-
tervals of a perfect fifth (the interval
you hear at the beginning of “Twin-
kle Twinkle Little Star”) almost
matches a cycle of seven octaves (an
octave is the interval at the begin-
ning of “Somewhere Over the Rain-
bow”)—but not quite. This is whytuning musical instruments was a
conundrum for a long time, and vari-
ous methods were used to try to
“correct” for the discrepancy.
Sometimes cycles of different
lengths can’t be forced to align. If
you need to take one medication ev-
ery four hours and another every six
hours, for instance, you will only be
able to take them at the same time
every 12 hours. That’s because 12 is
the lowest common multiple of four
and six, the lowest number that is a
multiple of each one individually.
The same principle enables us to
work out how long other non-match-
ing cycles will take to meet up. If
you need to do something every
three days, it won’t land back on the
same day of the week until you’ve
done it seven times. That’s because
there are seven days in a week and
seven is a prime number, which
means the lowest common multiple
of seven with any other number is
seven times that number.
The Spirograph drawing toy cre-
ates intricate patterns by using non-
matching cycles. It consists of an in-
ner wheel and an outer circular
frame whose cycles don’t match up.
Using a pen to trace the movement
of the wheel around the frame pro-
duces intricate patterns that change
slightly with every “orbit.”
Offset cycles can also be used to
create interesting rhythmic effects in
music. The idea is to pick two fairly
small numbers with a relatively large
lowest common multiple, such as six
and 11, whose lowest common multi-
ple is 66. If a piece of music uses
both of those rhythms simultane-
ously, our brains find it difficult to
latch onto the resulting overall cycle,
and the result is a hazy and un-
rooted sensation, as in many of Cho-
pin’s Nocturnes. Sometimes it’s im-
possible to make the neat and tidy
world of math match the messy real
world around us.FROM TOP: ALAMY; GETTY IMAGESWilliam James
(1842-1910), the
‘father of American
psychology.’REVIEW
‘We don’t
laugh
because
we’re happy,
we’re happy
because we
laugh.’
WILLIAM JAMESWhat to do after a divorce and a heart attack? Heed the advice of
a psychological pioneer and use action to improve your emotional state.William James,
Yoga and the Secret
Of Happiness
At its base, yoga
is very simple: Just
breathe and act.