Here’s how I found out about Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project: I saw that she was following me on the Twitter. I noticed straight away that she’s a real person — I think Twitterers know what I mean, but I define a real person as someone who uses Twitter for honest reasons, by which I mean they’re not going to spam me about weight loss programs immediately after I post something about having eaten an entire pint of ice cream (NB: I have never posted such a thing, which is not to say that I haven’t eaten an entire pint of ice cream) or how to get cheap cat meds after I post something about Scout’s health issues, and they don’t have a name like bambee20103 accompanied by a crude avatar and a tinyURL link to some porn site. Real people also post more than just links — they engage with others. And I don’t get followed by many real people. So I always check out the real people who follow me, and I noted that Gretchen Rubin has a blog called The Happiness Project, which coordinates with the book she’s written, and so I figured that she was following me as some sort of marketing/publicity thing, which I had no problem with at all, but I didn’t feel compelled to follow back. (Because I’m still not clear on why anyone who doesn’t know me would be at all interested in what I write on a daily basis, and while this is assuredly a hang-up of mine, it does seem to be supported by the fact that I haven’t been followed by a real person in about a month — thanks, Norma! Also, if someone is following more than let’s say 500 people, there’s no way at all that my sporadic posts are going to get noticed unless I @-them. Gretchen Rubin is following over 9000 people. She has no idea who I am. So I didn’t feel bad about not following her back — Twitter still is, for the most part, a place for me to chat among friends. ANYWAY.)
A month or two later The Happiness Project popped up on my radar again, though I don’t remember how or why. It was the beginning of the year, I was thinking about 2010 resolutions, and on a whim I ordered it. I think I was drawn to the “Clean my closets” part of the subtitle — any push in that direction is welcome. A few days later, I saw my friend Stephanie was going to attend an event for the book, so I emailed her to ask whether the book was really all that feel-good self-helpy, because I’m not really into books like that. Stephanie said that she’d been following Gretchen’s blog for a while and linked to a few posts that resonated with her. And they resonated with me, too — especially this one, on drift: “the decision you make by not deciding, or by making a decision that unleashes consequences for which you don’t take responsibility.” Yes, I kept saying silently. Yes. Me too. Happy and relieved that my impulse purchase had just been validated, I resolved to read The Happiness Project as soon as I could.
I am not exaggerating when I say that this book is life-changing. I could feel myself shift while reading it, could hear my mind expand (it’s a pleasing sort of stretchy sound). Gretchen Rubin is a wonderful writer. I imagine she writes the way she talks, and she has a high level of self-awareness made me instantly warm to her. She’s very clear from the beginning, and throughout the book, that she wasn’t really writing a self-help book, that everyone’s happiness projects would look different, that what worked for her wouldn’t necessarily work for someone else, for me. And yet I kept dogearring pages to return to because her ideas made so much sense to me. She’s also very cognizant of the negative reactions she could get — and did get — to the project, namely that she was already happy, that she lived a very comfortable life, that she had pretty much everything she already needed. She addresses all this in the beginning. I appreciated the level of self-reflection she brought to her narrative. I knew that I was on her side right away, after she recounted an experience at a cocktail party in which she told an acquaintance what she was doing and he immediately started dismissing it, and I wanted to reach into the book and give him a good upside the head slap. (She relates a few similar encounters, each one causing me to shake my head both at the rudeness of the response and at the way so many people seemed to be so sneeringly dismissive of happiness in general. I mean, why? Because it’s basic? Because it’s a warm-fuzzy sort of thing? I mean, something that’s been pondered and weighed and researched and examined from Plato’s time on can’t possibly be unimportant.)
Her sister points out that she’s going about this highly subjective, personal, intuitive experience in a completely systematic way — with charts and notes and fairly rigid organization (every month is dedicated to a specific resolution) and extensive research (the scholar in me was so pleased with that). Again, I love this. Totally the way I would tackle something — though my tendency is far more to make lists and then ignore them. But I think the act of list-making is important in itself, regardless of how thorough the follow-through is. I mean, yeah, obviously it’s not enough to make a list of things that need to get done if you’re not going to do them. But the mental process of checking in with yourself, taking the time to organize your thoughts and to-do’s, I think this is valuable work.
And yet, although she had all this surface organization, there’s still the sense that she spent the year throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to see what would stick. She chronicles experiments that didn’t work so well in addition to the ones that did. She discusses that initial burst of enthusiasm for something new that eventually erodes. There is a certain amount of chaos at work during her year, whether it comes in the form of unexpected bad news, or days in which all resolutions are chucked out the window. This is also extremely important. Days like that happen. It doesn’t mean you FAIL. In fact, the important work is the trial-and-error stuff, the process, the willingness to try stuff out — that’s where the happiness lies. (She discusses something called the arrival fallacy. This is one of my dogearred pages, because I am absolutely victim to it: “As soon as X happens, I will be happy.” Guess what? It’s not true.)
I am generally a happy person. I go through bouts where I am less than cheerful, and I have certainly had dark moments — well, dark months, many of them, stacked on top of each other — but for the most part I am happy. The point, she says, is not to GET happy. The point is to better recognize that you ARE, and to use that to achieve a greater sense of happiness. It’s all too easy to get caught up in daily minutia, and like Gretchen, I often go from point A to point B and then have NO RECOLLECTION of how I did so because my mind is off thinking about other things — usually worrying about other things. There is a lot I have to be grateful for, but there are also areas of my life that could use a little polish. Halfway through the book I started to be more mindful of my bad habits, or manners, or avoidance techniques, and now that I’ve finished it I’m ready to embark on my own set of experiments.
I heartily recommend the book and blog to everyone. Speaking as someone who struggles with a short temper and less-than-productive ways of dealing with stress and anxiety, I found the ideas put forth in this book extremely helpful — in particular, letting go of the need for explicit praise, the gold stars, from friends and family (and in my case, The Internet). Acknowledging that maybe you don’t like doing certain things that you think you’re supposed to like doing (for me? Yoga. Shocking, I know, but there it is. I keep saying I should go to yoga classes but I don’t — that’s my first clue. Being in a group of people I don’t know while trying to achieve some sort of mind-body synthesis seems contradictory and counter-productive. That’s just me, though — I know plenty of people for whom yoga has been transformative and amazing). Some of them are a little scary to contemplate, which indicates a need to examine them more closely. I’m thinking in particular of finally getting to the point where I can say out loud what it is that I want to do with my life. Because deep inside I do know. But I’m afraid of it and what it entails, and I’m deathly afraid of failing at it. So that? THAT I need to work on. Starting . . . well, I started two days ago. (Could you tell?)
(P.S. I’m following Gretchen Rubin on the Twitter now.)
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