The Happiness Project: A package arrived for me today: proof that keeping my happiness-project resolutions really does make me happier.

The Happiness Project

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT is the memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier – happily, it was a #1 New York Times bestseller. As one of the hundreds of experiments I've conducted, I started this blog. Here, I recount my daily adventures in pursuit of happiness. –

Gretchen Rubin

What Started Me Thinking

"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up." 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.”

People often ask me, “Come on. Has doing your happiness project really made you happier?”

The answer is YES.

Today, for example, I’m very happy because a package arrived in the mail from New Haven, due directly to a convergence of many happiness project resolutions…

“Be Gretchen.” I embraced my true interests and passions, including the love of children’s literature, which, for a long time, I denied.

“Reach out,” “Bring people together,” “Spend time with bookish people.” I started a children’s literature reading group.

“Follow my curiosities.” After my children’s literature reading group read Peter Pan, I became very interested in J. M. Barrie, and I read Andrew Birkin’s terrific biography, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys. Birkin gives a tantalizingly brief description of a book Barrie made with photographs of his muses, the four Llewelyn boys. Barrie produced just two copies of The Boy Castaway of Black Lake Island, and one copy was lost immediately.

“Take time for adventures.” Having noted that the one extant copy of The Boy Castaways was in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I made a pilgrimage to New Haven to see it for myself.

“Indulge in a modest splurge.” The moment I laid eyes on it, I realized that I HAD to have a copy! Digital images of the entire volume had been made, so I could order my own copy (images can also be viewed online). It was a not-so-modest splurge, actually, but I bought a copy of the book. It arrived today, and it is so fabulous!

“Think big,” “Make time for projects.” Inspired by The Boy Castaways, a very creative friend and I are planning a similar project using our children.

Every single element in this chain of events made me feel happy and energized. I’m so excited to have my very own copy of this book and to be starting an enormously challenging, creative project with a friend and our children.

I am 100% positive that before I started my happiness project and committed to my resolutions, I wouldn’t have started the book group, I wouldn’t have read the Barrie biography, I wouldn’t have traveled out of town to the Beinecke, I wouldn’t have splurged on the book – so it would never have occurred to me to collaborate on an homage to Barrie.

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Comments

I love children's lit. It all started with the book "Holes" and I haven't been able to get enough since. I am not embarrassed by it at all. I think children's lit is more imaginative in some respects than adult books.

I would love to see the reading list also.

Posted by: Lisa | October 31, 2007 at 04:22 PM

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