The Happiness Project: This Saturday: a quote from Anne Lamott.

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).

Twelve Personal Commandments

Four Splendid Truths

First: To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
Second: One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy; One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
Third: The days are long, but the years are short. (click the link to see my one-minute movie)
Fourth: You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.

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.”

This Saturday: a quote from Anne Lamott.

“But about a month before my friend Pammy died, she said something that may have permanently changed me. We had gone shopping for a dress for me to wear that night to a nightclub with the man I was seeing at the time. Pammy was in a wheelchair, wearing her Queen Mum wig, the Easy Rider look in her eyes. I tried on a lavender minidress, which is not my usual style. I tend to wear big, baggy clothes. People used to tell me I dressed like John Goodman. Anyway, the dress fit perfectly, and I came out to model it for her. I stood there feeling very shy and self-conscious and pleased. Then I said, ‘Do you think it makes my hips look too big?’ and she said to me slowly, 'Annie? I really don’t think you have that kind of time.’”
--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Posted July 29, 2006

Comments

I am sorry, but I just don't understand the quote. I have thought about it for a few days but the meaning just went wizzing over my head. Any help?

Posted by: Chuck Lee | August 02, 2006 at 09:03 PM

Back from a small island in the Caribbean where I went on impulse to help me get over a devastating heartbreak. I highly recommend this as a course of action in event of extreme sadness, the Caribbean Sea is so nurturing and forgiving. The people on the island were lovely, especially at Miss Massie's Hotel where I was staying. There is such a shortage of women in the Caribbean that men everywhere "sweet talked" me in lilting 16th century English accents.
My priviledge was to have the hotel room where I could see the little children swim all day. The village is poor, few have TV or video games and kids live outdoors - the natural world is their entertainment. All day long, I heard squeals of happiness and play like a chorus of excitement from all ages, most heartening.
I also had the opportunity on my insomniac mornings to observe a most unusual phenomena : the Dog Swimming Hour.
Before the humans get up in the morning, the dogs in the neighborhood gather to "hang" together in front of the hotel. They jostle and play affectionately, hump each other and run ecstatically up and down the beach. Then they swim together in an early morning refreshment, a sort of "taking the waters" madrugal. Big Dog, who is the guard dog at Miss Massie's protecting me and everyone else staying here, LOVES to swim. He gets into it and glides way out into the bay, an expression of pure contentment on his face as he floats between the fishing boats towards the Hotel Sylvester. I have seen the face of Happiness: Big Dog's face, swimming in the morning.

Posted by: Bebek | August 04, 2006 at 04:43 PM

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Posted by: mixer | September 23, 2007 at 06:15 PM

It doesn't look like anyone ever answered Chuck Lee's question. I know it is unlikely this will reach him, but the answer is this: Fretting about silly stuff is a waste of one's precious time, energy, heart and soul. (At least that is what I think she meant and I feel pretty sure about it.)

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Gretchen Rubin is a best-selling writer whose new book, The Happiness Project, is an account of the year she spent test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier. On this blog, she shares her insights to help you create your own happiness project.