The Happiness Project: The happiness of going on a vacation.

The Happiness Project

I’m working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, a memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happy--from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah. On this daily blog, I recount my adventures as I grapple with the challenge of being happier. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT will hit the shelves in December 2009 (Harper).

What Started Me Thinking

"Whoever is happy will make others happy, too." Mark Twain.
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Robert Louis Stevenson
"Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke 10:41-42
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Simone Weil
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette
“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G. K. Chesterton
“A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.” Joseph Addison
“Best is good. Better is best.” Lisa Grunwald
“Order is Heaven’s first law.” Alexander Pope

Happiness Theories I Reject

Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
Vauvenargues: “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”
Eric Hoffer: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Willa Cather: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them…”
Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”
John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

I just started a week's holiday in my favorite vacation destination. From the first moment, when our family is met right at the airline gate, I know we'll have a wonderful time. The beds are deep and soft, all our favorite foods are prepared, we can borrow a car anytime, there are shelves of books, toys, and DVDs, we have a full itinerary of visits to all the local places of interest, someone picks up the laundry, we have the use of a gym and a country club, babysitting is free and easy to arrange...

Yes, I love coming home to stay with my parents in Kansas City.

Clouding my enjoyment is the fact that my parents just moved and redecorated, and everywhere I look, I see beautifully spotless surfaces that are targets for damage. It would be bad enough if the Big Girl left a magic marker uncapped on the rug, or if the Little Girl smeared banana on a freshly painted wall--but they're being watched. What's far more likely to happen is that I'll overturn the bottle of syrupy infant Tylenol onto a newly recovered chair, or the Big Man will put down his coffee cup on a wooden table.

Much to their credit, my parents are very relaxed about our potential for destruction.

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