Be Happier: Embrace the paradoxes of a happiness project.

I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you could have one, too! Everyone’s project will look different, but it’s the rare person who can’t benefit. Join in -- no need to catch up, just jump in right now. Each Friday’s post will help you think about your own happiness project.

I’ve been very struck by an observation by physicist Niels Bohr: “There are trivial truths and great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

This is very true in the area of happiness, and in particular, I’ve noticed it with my resolutions. In many cases, my most important resolutions come paired with the opposite resolutions, and yet both are important to my happiness.

This tension was beautifully illustrated in a novel I love, Vikram Chandra’s mesmerizing Sacred Games. “Sartaj was thinking about how uncanny an animal this life was, that you had to seize it and let go of it at the same time, that you had to enjoy but also plan, live every minute and die every moment.”

I want to Be Gretchen and accept myself, but I also want to perfect my nature (as this entire project demonstrates). I want to think about myself so I can forget myself. I want to work on my own happiness so I can make other people happier.

I want to lighten up and not take myself so seriously — but I also want to take myself more seriously.

I want to spend my time efficiently and not waste it, but I also want to wander, to play, to fail, to read at whim. I want to keep an empty shelf, and also keep a junk drawer.

I want to be free from envy and fear of the future, and live fully in the present moment -- but not to lose my ambition.

Control and mastery are key elements of happiness; so are novelty and challenge.

Everything matters, and nothing matters. As Samuel Butler wrote in his Notebooks, “Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.”

Happiness doesn’t always make me feel happier.

The days are long, but the years are short.

Have you found any paradoxes that have been important to your happiness? Contrary resolutions that you try to follow in both directions?

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I had fun talking about happiness with Maura Kelly, who is keeping a blog A Year of Living Flirtatiously for Marie Claire. We talked about How to be happy -- even if you're single.

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Considering doing your own happiness project? Join the discussions on the Facebook Page to swap ideas, strategies, and experiences.

Comments

[Writer Dad]

WOW, what powerful thoughts. There is a mineshaft of riches that can be found in a seemingly simple paradox. My favorite here is The days are long, but the years are short. The melting minutes of our days is a big theme in my life and writing. In my most recent post in fact, I write about how the daily grind of life should never be so abrasive as to pull us out of a moment we will never get the chance to repeat.

[Laura Lee Bloor]

Great post, Gretchen! Yes, I've discovered many paradoxes along the happiness trail. One of the big ones I write about in my post "Happiness Is Fewer Choices" http://tenaciousme3.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/happiness-is-fewer-choices/ explains how we tend to think more options provide more opportunities for happiness. In reality, though, fewer options actually make us happier.

[Positively Present]

Love this post! Like you, I'm working on a happiness project of sorts over at Positively Present (http://positivelypresent.typepad.com) and I find that happiness doesn't always make me happier. I love the Butler quote you posted here. Everything matters more and less than we think it does. It's a confusing statement, but a true one. I'm going to have to give some more thought to happiness paradoxes... Thanks for this post. It's brilliant!

[Jon P]

You state:"I want to work on my own happiness so I can make other people happier."

Reading your posts makes me happier, but it's causing me to procrastinate from doing my work (the purpose of which is to make other people happier).

Yikes, I'm caught in a paradox! Thanks anyway for this cool blog.

[John O]

Happiness is a state of being not a state of mind. It is the mind that creates unhappiness by creating things to be happy about. Most people are motivated by unhappiness, out of this unhappiness come ideas for happiness. An idea that begins with unhappiness cannot produce happiness. It produces noting but an illusion that always ends in failure because it begins in unhappiness and unhappiness will never produce happiness. How do like that for a paradox?

[Christopher]

Wow I think you covered it all - there is enough in this post to keep my mind busy for days and days.

[hly]

Wanting to make ourselves likable
Trying to please everyone but pleasing no one.

[Barbara]

This one really resonates for me. I need to set goals in order to get anything accomplished. At the same time I have to resist my natural tendency to burden myself with a list of "shoulds" --creating cages for myself. Because then I inevitably rebel. I think this may be the paradox of perfectionism. This entry makes me see that perhaps the answer is in embracing the paradox.
Barbara

[Maggie]

Oh I love this post. Life is a paradox is definitely a big truth which, I guess, makes it's opposite also true. LOL. Similar to the "Everything Matters and Nothing Matters" concept. I've always found your "Be Gretchen" paradox the hardest. To accept myself and yet work on changing myself for the better. Doing the first part is far more difficult than working toward it's opposite. Another difficult one most people I know is the idea that doing for and giving to others makes you happier but you need to take time for yourself to be happier as well. Great post. Thanks for today's deep thoughts.

[Lula]

how to be happy--"even" if you're single presupposes that one has to be in a relationship in order to be happy. :(

[Meream]

To not care too much about the things I own but realizing that some things have transcended beyond material possession and have become a symbol of happier days.

[The Healthy Librarian]

You've struck on the ultimate challenge of life--how to be comfortable & happy within the paradoxes.

Sometimes one thing works--sometimes it's another. The secret is flexibility.

Whatever works is always changing.

Here's a couple:

I want to be close to my adult children, but I want to give them space & not smother them.

I want to have a clean house and a beautiful yard, but I want to be OK with letting things go when more important things demand my attention.

I can go on all day with this because the bottom line is: There's a dark side to everything--the "light" side I guess is somewhere in the middle--like the "sweet spot" where you can balance on the teeter-totter.

But let's call it "Extreme Balance"--not boring middle of the road stuff!

[vanessa]

My mother always told me "some people are wise - some people are other wise" So true!

[Queen Ann D]

Living under a get of good laws or rules (that is, limiting ourselves in some ways) actually makes us more free.

[Mary]

Great post! Interesting to think about the paradox. I love the one about using your time efficiently and not wasting it, and yet wanting to wander, to play, to read at whim... Great to remember that as we try to apply rules and structure to our lives, we are allowing ourselves the space to live more freely.

[KCCC]

The Bohr quote is one of my very favorites. It blew me away when I first heard it - I could see many of the "big issues" of society framed as "opposing Great Truths." From there, I learned to LOOK for the opposing truth, and now conceive life decisions as a series of balance points between them...

And balance is not static. Sometimes you move in one direction or the other to maintain it. :)

[Billthomson]

I went from graduate school to a government research lab as a postdoc. The exceptionally well-educated people working there were among the least satisfied with their jobs of anyone I had ever met, putting in their time but bored to death with their jobs. One day in a discussion with two other postdocs, one mentioned that he wanted a permanent job there because the hours are great. Sure said the other, "The hours are great, but the minutes are horrible."

[Single and loving it]

"We talked about How to be happy -- even if you're single."

EVEN IF you're single? Maybe I'm reading too much into those two little words, but I am chafing at the negative connotations of this statement. Maybe your friend isn't happy being single but happiness and singledom are not mutually exclusive. More single people might be happier if married people didn't make them feel like objects of pity.

I'm single and very happy - far happier than some of my married friends.