The Happiness Project

Bad parenting: back from the brink

This morning I almost made a classic bad-parenting move: denying a bad feeling.

We began the day at 6:30 a.m. with the Big Girl claiming, “No one’s paying attention to me. Everyone pays more attention to the Baby. Even when she’s ripping my book or pulling my hair, no one cares.”

This is absurd, and I started to snap back with the usual, “She’s too little to know what she’s doing, and how can you say no one’s paying attention to you? We played eight games of Uno yesterday,” etc., etc.

Just in time, I remembered the principle I’d recently re-read in the greatest parenting books of all time, Faber and Mazlish’s How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. (It’s a parenting book but the principles apply equally well to dealing with other adults.)

They say: Don’t refuse to acknowledge someone’s feelings of anger, irritation, or reluctance; instead, name the feeling and articulate the other person’s point of view.  This is much harder to do than it sounds, because the urge to correct a bad feeling is very strong: “you can’t be hungry,” “you love Tae Kwon Do,” “you always have fun at parties.”

But I gave it a shot. “You wish people would pay more attention to you? You’re feeling neglected?” She nodded.

“Come here,” I said, “let me give you a big hug.”

As simple as it was, that did the trick. And the nice thing about this approach was that not only did it work, I felt nice doing it, while that other kind of arguing puts me in a bad mood.

For no reason at all, I did a little research on koans.

Each month of the Happiness Project has a different focus; March is Work and Leisure month.

As part of this, I’ve been keeping an “interest journal,” where I note topics that particularly intrigue me—because I’ve realized that I often ignore my interests, or try to make myself interested in subjects I think should interest me. And I’m pushing myself to follow up.

So when I recently became interested in Zen koans, I let myself poke around on the internet and read Miura and Sasaki’s Zen Dust: The History of the Koan.

Zen Buddhist monks meditate on koans, or teaching riddles, as a way to abandon dependence on reason in their pursuit of enlightenment. The most famous: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” Here are a few of my favorites:

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, “The flag is moving.” The other said, “The wind is moving.” The sixth patriarch happened to pass by. He said, “Not the wind, not the flag, mind is moving.”

Getsuan said to his students, “Keichu, the first wheel-maker in China, made two wheels having fifty spokes each. Suppose you took a wheel and removed the nave uniting the spokes. What would become of the wheel? If Keichu had done so, could he be called the master wheel-maker?"

Wikipedia has an entry on hacker koans—hilarious.

I realized that I’ve collected lines that work like koans for me:

Robert Frost: “The best way out is always through.”

Francis Bacon/Heraclitus: “Dry light is ever the best.” 

Matthew 6:21: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

G. K. Chesterton:  “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.”

Boswell, Life of Johnson: “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.” 

This Wednesday: Tips…for reaching a goal.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day.  This Wednesday: Tips for reaching a goal.

When I was procrastinating about launching this blog, I found some suggestions that helped me get it done. If you’re having trouble accomplishing a task, try these tips:

n      Write down your goal.

n      Make a long to-do list to give yourself a feeling of progress as you work toward a distant goal.

n      Break your main task into smaller, more manageable tasks, and begin by doing whatever is easiest. If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be suprised to find how little remains that we cannot do. Samuel Butler.

n      Set a deadline.

n      Don’t give up if something interferes with your deadline.

n      Ask advice and support from knowledgeable people.

n      Get familiar with other people’s work, so you don’t reinvent the wheel.

n      Sometimes it helps to keep the stakes low at the beginning, so you feel less worried about making a mistake; sometimes it helps to keep the stakes high from the beginning, so you're not tempted to slack off.

n      Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s better to do something imperfectly than nothing perfectly. 

Always think of what you have to do as easy and it will become so. Émile Coué.

I'm forcing myself to stop "saving" my clothes.

This morning I had to force myself to put on the soft, stretchy pink hooded sweatshirt my mother gave me for Christmas. It wasn't that I don't like it; I like it TOO MUCH. I find myself "saving" it.

Because of this habit, I find that I have two piles in my closet: one of ratty, worn-out clothes I wear too much; and one of things I love, but refuse to wear, because I want to keep them nice.

Clearly this is ridiculous. Last weekend I threw away most (I confess, not all, just couldn't manage it) of the ratty pile and reminded myself of the things I should be wearing.

Here's an example. With pants and boots, I've been wearing a pair of black socks with holes in the heels and sprung elastic. In the same drawer, I have a new pair of black socks, still in the packaging, from Christmas two years ago.  I kept wearing the horrible pair "one last time." It's no less wasteful to keep wearing the worn pair; I'm wasting the perfectly good socks by not wearing them! No more.  This is one of my twelve commandments: SPEND OUT.

The blog begins.

Today is the first day of the Happiness Project blog.

Now, what is the Happiness Project?

            One afternoon a few years ago, I realized with a jolt that I was allowing my life to flash by without facing a critical question: was I happy?

From that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about happiness. Was it mostly a product of temperament? Could I take steps to be happier? What did it even mean to be “happy”?

So The Happiness Project is my memoir of one year in which I test-drive every principle, tip, theory, and research-study result I can find, from Aristotle to St. Therese to Benjamin Franklin to Martin Seligman to Oprah. What advice actually works?

That very fact that I’ve started this blog makes me happy, because now I’ve achieved one of my chief goals this month (just in time, too). I set myself a task, worked toward it, and achieved it.

Preparing to launch the blog reminded me of two of LIFE’S TRUE RULES:

First, ask for help. When trying to get started, I floundered until I thought to do the obvious: ask for advice from friends with blogs.

Second, keep moving, slow and steady. We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in an hour or a week, and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month or a year, by doing just a little bit each day. 

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. --Anthony Trollope