“Sentimentality is a flaw in a work of art, certainly, but the word is often thrown at great and overpowering works of art that embarrass critics who live, emotionally, in St. Ogg’s, though intellectually they have journeyed south as far as Cambridge.  The ending of The Mill on the Floss moves me to tears, though I am not an easy weeper.  It is not the immediate pathos of the death of Maggie and Tom that thus affects me:  it is rather that a genuine completion of human involvement has been attained, but attained only through Death.  A happiness beyond mere delight has been experienced – a happiness as blasting and destroying as an encounter with the gods. 

“To my mind, this is anything but sentimental.  People who prate of sentimentality are very often people who hate being made to feel, and who hate anything that cannot be intellectually manipulated.  But the purgation through pity and terror which is said to be the effect of tragedy is not the only kind of purgation that art can bring.  The tempest in the heart that great novels can evoke is rarely tragic in the strict sense, but it is an arousal of feelings of wonder at the strangeness of life, and desolation at the implacability of life, and dread of the capriciousness of life which for a few minutes overwhelms all our calculations and certainties and leaves us naked in a turmoil from which cleverness cannot save us.”

–Robertson Davies, “Phantasmagoria and Dream Grotto,” One Half of Robertson Davies

While I was writing my biography of Winston Churchill, I spent a lot of time thinking about these lines from Roberson Davies. Churchill is often accused of sentimentality, and I had to explain why I thought he was not sentimental.

 

I remember reading somewhere that writer Anne Lamott thinks about herself in the third person, to take better care of herself: “I’m sorry, Anne Lamott can’t accept that invitation to speak; she’s finishing a book so needs to keep her schedule clear.”

Similarly, I imagine myself as a toddler. “Gretchen gets cranky when she’s over-tired. We really need to stick to the usual bedtimes.” “Gretchen gets frantic when she’s really hungry, so she can’t wait too long for dinner.” “Gretchen needs some quiet time each day.” “Gretchen really feels the cold, so we can’t be outside for too long.”

The fact is, if you’re dealing with a toddler, you have to plan. You have to think ahead about eating, sleeping, proper winter clothes, necessary equipment, a limit on sweets, etc. Because with a toddler, the consequences can be very unpleasant. In the same way, to be good-humored and well-behaved, I need to make sure I have my coffee, my cell-phone charger, my constant snacks, and my eight hours of sleep.

I mentioned this new approach to a friend, who laughed and said, “As a toddler, I don’t handle noise or crowds well. I can’t be in that kind of situation for long.”

It’s easy to expect that you “should” be able to deal with a particular situation, and of course, to a point, it’s admirable to be flexible, to be low-maintenance. But I realize that I’m much happier — and more fun to be around — if I recognize my limits.

How about you? What kind of toddler are you? Or do you have other strategies to help manage yourself?

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.

Happiness interview: Rebekah Sanderlin.

I “met” (virtually) Rebekah through a mutual friend, and I was thrilled to read her post yesterday, on the New York Times blog At War, about how Happier at Home was helpful to her during reintegration:  Finding home again after deployment.

 I don’t have any personal experience with this kind of happiness challenge, and I was gratified to hear that the book was nevertheless helpful.

 Rebekah writes a lot about the special challenges (happiness-related and otherwise) faced by military families. She’s a writer, married to a soldier, with three children, and her writing is both hilarious and thought-provoking.

Gretchen: What’s a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?

Rebekah: Making my bed makes me happy — but I want to be absolutely clear that I’m am not at all OCD. The rest of my house is usually a mess, in fact. It’s not the act of making the bed that makes me happy — I actually hate doing it — but seeing the bed made means that my day has begun. Everything around me can be in a state of total chaos, but a made bed makes me feel like I can tackle the day. 

What’s something you know now about happiness that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old? 

Happiness isn’t always obvious and you don’t always realize that you’re happy in the moment. Sometimes it takes perspective, the kind only gained through hardship and pain, to realize that you’ve been happy in the past. At 18 years old, I hadn’t really experienced enough sadness to appreciate all the times I’ve been happy. 

Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness? 

I am always late. Always. I get absorbed in some other project and lose track of time, then I get stressed and embarrassed about being late — again.  

Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful? (e.g., I remind myself to “Be Gretchen.”) Or a happiness quotation that has struck you as particularly insightful? Or a particular book that has stayed with you?

“Keep advancing the ball.” 

When I was a senior in high school, only one girl tried out for my school’s golf team. The school was going to have to forfeit the season. The golf coach was my Ecology teacher and he told me that he would teach me how to play if I would just agree to be on the team, so I signed up. (My grades were bad and I hoped he’d slide me a few points.) I was horrible at golf. The first few times I tried to hit a ball off of a tee I missed the ball completely. Then, once I started hitting the ball, it would only go 10 or 20 feet at a time. I hacked the fairways to pieces. My coach was patient, though, and he just kept saying, “It doesn’t matter how far it goes, as long as you’re advancing the ball.” That has become my mantra. I don’t have to be great at everything, I just have to continually make forward progress.

If you’re feeling blue, how do you give yourself a happiness boost?

I talk to my sister on the phone. She’s just 14 months older than me and has always been my ‘partner in crime.’ It takes very little for the two of us to riff off each other and come up with outlandish projects and dreams. Talking to her always cheers me up. Once we wrote a pop song over the phone called “Last Call for Booty” —  we even found a singer, rented a recording studio and had it made into a demo. We intended it to be the cheesy last song nightclubs play before they turn on the lights. It has yet to become a hit.  

Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness?

People who surround themselves with positive people, not necessarily happy people, but people who are proactive, seem to be happier. Conversely, people who surround themselves with people I call “joy suckers” can easily get their own happiness zapped. Unhappy people tend to be drawn to upbeat people, but then instead of one person’s happiness lifting the other’s sadness, the sad person tends to drag the positive person down. Once you’ve achieved a positive state, you have to guard it carefully. 

Have you always felt about the same level of happiness, or have you been through a period when you felt exceptionally happy or unhappy – if so, why? If you were unhappy, how did you become happier?

My happiness level has been in a state of dramatic flux for most of the past decade, since I became an Army wife. My husband and I dated long distance and then got married on March 8, 2003; I moved to the Army town where he lived two days later (I’d only been there once before); I started a job at the daily newspaper there on March 18; the Iraq War started on March 19; and my husband deployed on April 1. We’d been married for just 3 weeks. Needless to say, I got my first taste — but certainly not my last — of clinical depression shortly thereafter. 

For almost a decade our lives have followed this pattern. He was home for just three weeks after the birth of our first child before deploying for nine months. He’s been deployed eight times during these 10 years of marriage, and so many times now we’ve experienced the amazing highs of a homecoming, followed by the amazing lows of trying to live together again and saying goodbye again. 

The worst time, by far, was in 2008. My father was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and given just six months to live; I found out I was pregnant with our second child; two doctors agreed that a spot in my mouth was probably lymphoma but couldn’t biopsy it until after the baby was born; and then my husband deployed for the third time to southern Afghanistan, where the fighting was especially bad. I moved home to be with my dad and spent months watching him die, all the while talking to my husband on the phone most days and hearing about the horrible things he was seeing and enduring. After my father’s death I moved back into my house in North Carolina — just in time for hurricane season. My husband was still deployed and, wouldn’t you know it? I went into labor in the middle of a hurricane and made it to the hospital just minutes before my beautiful daughter was born. Add in five months of five-hours-a-day-crying-colic, and it really didn’t seem like the year could get much worse. 

That year I was literally in survival mode. I had lost my dad, I was very aware that I could lose my husband and I had every reason to believe that my own life hung in the balance. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I handled each problem as it arose. My husband likes to refer to this as “aiming for the 50 meter target”, by the way, meaning that you “shoot” the target that’s closest to you before shooting the targets behind it. 

I made plans and drew up legal documents for who would raise my children if my husband and I were to both die. I enrolled my three-year-old in full time day care, even though I stayed home every day, simply because I needed the breaks. I accepted every offer of help anyone made and I learned to ask, beg even, for more help. Finally, I cut out every unnecessary thing and every person who did not add value to my life. I kept only the things in my life that brought me strength and joy. It was a horrible year, but there were some very good times, too. And, I did finally get the biopsy and learned, thankfully, that the spot was benign. 

I think sometimes life throws impossible situations at us — times when all of our normal coping mechanisms are doomed to fail. I think these situations exist for two reasons: 1) to make us grow and 2) to make us rely on things outside of ourselves. For me, my faith in God and my friendships carried me through that year. I would never want to repeat that year, but I’m actually grateful for all that I went through because of the lessons I learned and the strength and sense of accomplishment that come from endurance and survival. 

Is there some aspect of your home that makes you particularly happy?

I have a wall of framed photographs of beautiful places that I’ve taken on trips; haunting landscapes, churches, street scenes and sunsets. The pictures are carefully curated, printed to 11×14 size and beautifully framed. I love looking at those pictures. They are eye-pleasing and bring back wonderful memories, but I also take pride in knowing that I was the photographer who took them. 

Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn’t – or vice versa? 

Marriage and parenthood both shocked the hell out of me! I thought marriage would be like a never ending sleepover with my best friend, just non-stop fun. And I thought parenting would be just days and days of cooing over a perfect little version of me. I was not at all prepared for the many trials that followed! Both experiences are much more rewarding than I ever dreamed they would be, but I was completely unprepared for all the difficult times. 

 

One obstacle to happiness is feeling resentful when another person won’t do his or her share of the work. In Happier at Home, in my description of the three kinds of “happiness leeches,” this kind of person is a “slacker.”

Resentment comes when you feel angry that you’ve been treated unfairly. But what is “fair” when deciding who should do what work? As I thought about my own (not infrequent) bouts of resentment, I identified these Six Facts About Shared Work.

Fact 1: Work done by other people sounds easy. How hard can it be to take care of a newborn who sleeps twenty hours a day? How hard can it be to keep track of your billable hours? To travel for one night for business?  To get a four-year-old ready for school? To return a few phone calls? To load the dishwasher? To fill out some forms?

Of course, something like “performing open-heart surgery” sounds difficult, but to a very great degree, daily work by other people sounds easy—certainly easier that what we have to do.

This fact leads us to under-estimate how onerous a particular task is, when someone else does it, and that makes it easy to assume that we don’t need to help or provide support. Or even be grateful. For that reason, we don’t feel very obligated to share the burden.

Fact 2: When you’re doing a job that benefits other people, it’s easy to assume that they feel conscious of the fact that you’re doing this work—that they should feel grateful, and that they should and do feel guilty about not helping you.

But no! Often, the more reliably you perform a task, the less likely it is for someone to notice that you’re doing it, and to feel grateful, and to feel any impulse to help or to take a turn.

You think, “I’ve been making the first pot of coffee for this office for three months! When is someone going to do it?” In fact, the longer you make that coffee, the less likely it is that someone will do it.

 If one person on a tandem bike is pedaling hard, the other person can take it easy. If you’re reliably doing a task, others will relax. They aren’t silently feeling more and more guilty for letting you shoulder the burden; they probably don’t even think about it. And after all, how hard is it to make a pot of coffee? (see Fact #1).

Being taken for granted is an unpleasant but sincere form of praise. Ironically, the more reliable you are, and the less you complain, the more likely you are to be taken for granted.

Fact 3: It’s hard to avoid “unconscious overclaiming.” In unconscious overclaiming, we unconsciously overestimate our contributions relative to others. This makes sense, because we’re far more aware of what we do than what other people do. Also, we tend to do the work that we value. I think holiday cards are important; my husband thinks that keeping the air-conditioning working is important.

Studies showed that when spouses estimated what percentage of housework each performed, the percentages added up to more than 120 percent. When business-school students estimated how much they’d contributed to a team effort, the total was 139 percent.

It’s easy to think “I’m the only one around here who bothers to…” or “Why do I always have to be the one who…?” but ignore all the tasks you don’t do. And maybe others don’t think that task  is as important as you do (See Fact #5).

Fact 4: Taking turns is easier than sharing. I read somewhere that young children have a lot of trouble “sharing” but find it easier to “take turns.” Sharing is pretty ambiguous; taking turns is clearer and serves the value of justice, which is very important to children.

I think this is just as true for adults. I have to admit, shared tasks often give me the urge to try to shirk. Maybe if I pretend not to notice that the dishwasher is ready to be emptied, my husband will do it! And often he does. Which bring us to…

Fact 5: The person who cares the most will often end up doing a task. If you care more about a task being done, you’re more likely to end up doing it–and don’t expect other people to care as much as you do, just because something is important to you. It’s easy to make this mistake in marriage. You think it’s important to get the basement organized, and you expect your spouse to share the work, but your spouse thinks, “We never use the basement anyway, so why bother?” Just because something’s important to you doesn’t make it important to someone else, and people are less likely to share work they deem unimportant. At least not without a lot of nagging.

 Fact 6. If you want someone else to do a task, don’t do it yourself. This sounds so obvious, but think about it. Really. Let it go. If you think you shouldn’t have to do it, don’t do it. Wait. Someone else is a lot more likely to do it if you don’t do it first. Note: this means that a task is most likely to be done by the person who cares most (see Fact #5).

Of course, this doesn’t always work. Someone must get the kids ready for school. But many tasks are optional.

I’ve just started thinking about this, and my ideas are still coming together. What did I get wrong–or overlook?

–Would you like a signed, personalized, free bookplate for a copy of Happier at Home or The Happiness Project, to make a gift more personal?  (Or would you like one for yourself?) Or, for e-books or audio-books, a signature card? Email me to request them: just be sure to include your mailing address and people’s names. I’ll mail anywhere, and ask for as many as you like. But PLEASE request them soon, if this is for a holiday gift; fact is, I can be pretty slow.

Each week, I post a video about some Pigeon of Discontent raised by a reader. Because, as much as we try to find the Bluebird of Happiness, we’re also plagued by those small but pesky Pigeons of Discontent.

This week’s Pigeon of Discontent, suggested by a reader, is: “I don’t know how to start my happiness project.”

 

If you want to read more about this resolution, check out…

Get started on your own happiness project.

5 tips for planning effective New Year’s resolutions.

13 tips for sticking to your New Year’s resolutions.

You can check out the archives of videos here. It’s crazy–my YouTube channel has passed the mark for one million viewers.