The Happiness Project (30 page)

You might experiment with new recipes, go camping in your fifteenth state park, plan a sixtieth birthday party, or watch your favorite team progress to the Super Bowl. I liked writing a novel.

MAKE TIME.

Although reading was one of my most important priorities and certainly one of my greatest pleasures, I never really gave it much thought. I wanted to make more time to read—more books, with more enjoyment. To do so, I gave myself permission to read at whim. Samuel Johnson observed, “If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.” Science backs this up. When researchers tried to figure out what helped third-and fourth-graders remember what they read, they found that the students’ interest in a passage was far more important than the “readability” of the passage—
thirty times
more important.

So between the books I read for happiness research, such as Jonathan Haidt’s
The Happiness Hypothesis,
Anne Lamott’s
Plan B,
and some biographies of Tolstoy, I threw in Lesley Lewis’s
The Private Life of a Country House 1912–1939.
Along the same lines, I let myself reread William Makepeace Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair,
Charlotte Yonge’s
The Heir of Redclyffe,
and Laura Ingalls Wilder whenever I had the urge, instead of steering myself to read something new. I’ve always thought that the best reading is rereading. I
pushed myself to keep reading lists. I asked people for recommendations (as a side benefit, this turned out to be a relationship booster; people responded warmly when I wrote down their suggestions). On the advice of a fellow member of the children’s literature book group, I subscribed to
Slightly Foxed,
a charming British quarterly that publishes people’s essays about their favorite books, and I noted suggestions from the magazine
The Week
’s “The Book List” section.

But the main hurdle keeping me from reading more wasn’t the problem of figuring out
what
to read but rather having enough
time
to read. No matter how much time I spent reading, I wanted more. Of course, whenever anyone complains of not having enough time, the first suggestion is always “Watch less TV.” Which makes sense—the average American spends between four and five hours watching TV each day.

“Do you think we watch too much TV?” I asked Jamie.

“We hardly watch any TV,” he said.

“Well, we do watch some. What do you think, five or six hours a week? But we only watch what we’ve TiVo’d or from a DVD.”

“I don’t think we should give up all TV,” he said. “TV is great—if you’re not watching in a stupid way.”

He was right. It was fun to watch a show once the girls were asleep. Watching TV seemed more companionable than reading in the same room; I suppose the fact that we were sharing the same experience made it seem cozier.

I did, however, vow to stop reading books that I didn’t enjoy. I used to pride myself on finishing every book I started—no longer. And just as I used to make myself finish every book, I used to keep every book I bought, and we had messy stacks on every surface of our house. I culled ruthlessly, and we dropped off several heavy bags of books at a thrift store. I also accepted my idiosyncratic reluctance to read any book (or see any play or movie) that centers on the theme of unjust accusation. I was never going to be able to force myself to read
Oliver Twist, Othello, To Kill a Mockingbird,
Atonement, A Passage to India, Burmese Days, Crime and Punishment,
or
Arthur and George
if I could avoid it—and that was okay.

FORGET ABOUT RESULTS.

As I read, I love to take notes—often for no apparent reason. I’m always marking up books, making odd lists, gathering examples in strange categories, copying passages. For some reason, I like working on some permanent, undefined research project. I feel compelled to make lists of foreign words that describe concepts that English can’t convey (
flâneur, darshan, eudaimonia
,
Ruinensehnsucht
,
amae, nostalgie de la boue
), explanations of concepts that I find queerly charged with significance (the Fisher King, the westerly road, Croatoan, Eleusinian Mysteries, offering of first-fruits, the hunting of the wren, the Corn-Spirit,
sparagmos,
the Lord of Misrule, cargo cult, Greek
herm,
potlatch, the Golden Ratio), and hundreds of other topics.

Note taking takes a lot of time and energy, and I used to discourage this impulse in myself. It seemed pointless and self-indulgent. But following this month’s resolutions and my First Commandment to “Be Gretchen,” I allowed myself to “Forget about results” and take notes guilt-free.

Perversely, it was only once I said to myself, “Okay, Gretchen, take all the notes you want, it doesn’t matter why,” that it occurred to me how
useful
these notes had been. My first book,
Power Money Fame Sex,
grew out of a huge body of notes. When I had a chance to write my book
Profane Waste,
about the question of why people would choose to destroy their possessions, I was able to pack the book with startling, apt examples because I’d been taking notes (for no discernible reason) for years. Because note taking didn’t look like “real work” to me, it didn’t register as valuable—even though it was.

One thing that makes a passion enjoyable is that you don’t have to worry about results. You can strive for triumph, or you can potter around, tinker, explore, without worrying about efficiency or outcomes. Other
people may wonder why you’ve been happy to work on the same old car for years, even though it’s still not running, but that doesn’t matter to you. An atmosphere of growth brings great happiness, but at the same time, happiness sometimes also comes when you’re free from the pressure to see much growth. That’s not surprising; often, the opposite of a great truth is also true.

MASTER A NEW TECHNOLOGY.

To me, making books sounded like fun. As a child, I’d spent countless hours working on my Blank Books. I’d written two horrible novels before I became a professional writer. Throughout my life, I’d made minibook projects as gifts for my family and friends. When I thought about the projects that I’d loved doing with Eliza, they all involved making books.

For example, she and I made a book using some of her bright, elaborate drawings. She dictated a caption for each picture while I typed; then we cut out the captions, taped them on the pictures, made color copies, and had the copies spiral-bound into a book. It was a fun project to work on, made a wonderful keepsake, supplied a Christmas/Hanukkah gift for the grandparents, captured a moment in Eliza’s development,
and
allowed me to throw away the enormous stacks of pictures without a smidgen of guilt. (However, I will admit that when I wrote about this project on my blog, one reader was shocked: “I can’t believe you actually threw out the originals of your daughter’s drawings. I would have made the copies, as you did, but bound the originals into a scrapbook of sorts. The originals can NEVER be duplicated. I must confess to actually gasping when I read this.”)

Recently I’d been intrigued to read about a self-publishing site, Lulu.com. According to the Web site, I could print a proper hardback book, complete with dust jacket, for less than thirty dollars. I mentioned this to Jamie, and he snorted, “What would anyone use that for?”

“You mean, who has book-length documents lying around that they’d like to print in book form?” I asked.

“Right.”

“Are you kidding?
Me!
” I said. “If this works, I’ll print up a dozen.” At last, something to do with all those notes I’d been taking without a purpose. For the trial run, I made a book out of the journal I’d kept for the first eighteen months of Eliza’s life (another book I’d written without really noticing it). I sat down at the computer, preparing to “put myself in jail” to cope with my frustration and my desire to rush. Instead, the whole process took about twenty minutes.

When my self-published book arrived a few weeks later, it exceeded my wildest expectations. There was my baby journal! As a
real book!
What next? I did a book of my favorite quotations about the nature of biography, I did a book of my favorite uncategorized quotations, and I fantasized about future books. When I finished my research on happiness, I’d print out a book of my favorite happiness quotations; maybe I could even include photo illustrations. I’d make a book of my blog posts. I’d print out my novel,
Happiness
. I’d print up my one-sentence journal—I could even make copies for the girls! Plus I had so many ideas for great happiness-related books. If I couldn’t publish them with a real publisher, I would publish them myself.

I also learned that through Shutterfly, an online photo ser vice site, I could print a hardback photo album. Figuring out how to do this turned out to be challenging, but eventually I mastered it, and once I was done, I ordered a copy for us and the grandparents, and everyone received a neat, organized book, stuffed with photos. Although it was expensive, I reminded myself that not only was I keeping my resolution to “Master a new technology,” I was also keeping my resolutions to “Make purchases that will further my goals,” “Indulge in a modest splurge,” and “Be a treasure house of happy memories.”

And once I got through the painful learning curve, it was fun. The novelty and challenge of mastering the technology—though I was mad
dened with frustration at times—did give me enormous satisfaction, and it gave me a new way to pursue my passion for books.

Of all the months so far, September’s resolutions had been the most pleasant and easiest to maintain. This showed me, once again, that I was happier when I accepted my own real likes and dislikes, instead of trying to decide what I
ought
to like; I was happier when I stopped squelching the inclinations toward note taking and bookmaking that I’d had since childhood and instead embraced them. As Michel de Montaigne observed, “The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.”

I needed to accept my own nature—yet I needed to push myself as well. This seemed contradictory, but in my heart, I knew the difference between lack of interest and fear of failure. I’d seen this in March with my blog. Although I’d been nervous about launching a blog, I did recognize that running a blog is the kind of thing I would like to do. In fact, I realized, my work on my childhood Blank Books, where I had pulled together interesting information, copied quotations, and matched text with striking images, sounded an awful lot like…posting to my blog. Sheesh. In fact, once I realized that, I decided to give up working on my new Blank Book. I’d had fun working on it since May, and I’d gotten a nostalgic kick from resuming an activity that had given me so much pleasure in childhood, but I’d grown tired of it. My blog had taken its place as an outlet to record the odds and ends I felt compelled to gather.