What if you took a year and went through your book shelves, your notebooks and all the things the world tells us about how to be happy? Would it work? Or would it just be a jumble of a year filled with self-help mantras battling for attention?
Gretchen Rubin tried it. She spent a year researching and playing, reading and trying new things. If there was a study, a book or a philosophy about happiness, she devoured it. And then she followed its advice. and she blogged about it. And the blog became a book, winningly subtitled “Or, Why I Spent A Year Trying To Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.”
And we are paying attention. Rubin's book was out just a week when it hit No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list, and is the 14th hottest seller on Amazon (even including fiction).
Rubin has clearly hit a nerve. There are a lot of us who are are having hard times right now, and we want to know that the key to making them better lies inside us.
An excerpt:
“As I looked out the blurry bus window, I saw two figures cross the street — a woman about my age trying simultaneously to balance an umbrella, look at her cell phone, and push a stroller carrying a yellow-slickered child. The sight gave me a jolt of recognition: that’s me, I thought, there I am. I have a stroller, a cell phone, an alarm clock, an apartment, a neighborhood. Right now, I’m riding the same crosstown bus that I take across the park, back and forth. This is my life — but I never give any thought to it.
I wasn’t depressed and I wasn’t having a midlife crisis, but I was suffering from midlife malaise — a recurrent sense of discontent and almost a feeling of disbelief. “Can this be me?” I’d wonder as I picked up the morning newspapers or sat down to read my e-mail. “Can this be me?” My friends and I joked about the “beautiful house” feeling, when, as in the David Byrne song “Once in a Lifetime,” we’d periodically experience the shock of thinking “This is not my beautiful house.”
“Is this really it?” I found myself wondering, and answering, “Yep, this is it.”
Rubin had a husband and two daughters, a home and a career. She was grateful beyond words for those things. But there was something lacking, and she set out to find it.
She read world religions, and self-help gurus. She read non-fiction and fiction, science and poetry, economics and classic literature. She sought wisdom from organizational experts and fortune cookies. She made twelve resolutions – one for each month – (Boost energy, have more fun) that became her marching orders for the year. She made twelve commandments – No. 1 is “Be Gretchen” and No. 12 is “There is only love.” And she crafted a “Secrets of Adulthood” list, which meanders through such things as “People don’t notice your mistakes as much as you think” and “Bring a sweater.”
The resolutions were followed. The closets were cleaned. And Rubin blogged.
What did she learn?
That the ancient secrets were right: You have to live, to love, and to embrace the moment. You have to realize that ordinary days aren’t ordinary. You have to see, to listen, to taste, to try.
“I was pretty happy when I started,” Rubin told the Wall Street Journal, “and I’m a lot happier now. I am surprised by how much of a difference it has made.”
Ready to start your own happiness project? I am.
Gretchen Rubin's "The Happiness Project" blog:
http://www.happiness-project.com/
The Today Show video and an excerpt from the book:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/34736178/ns/today-today_books/
A Wall Street Journal Q&A:
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/12/31/new-years-resolutions-from-the-happiness-project-author-gretchen-rubin/
A Gretchen Rubin video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozwXVqf-vhQ&feature=player_embedded
The Christian Science Monitor book review:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2010/0107/The-Happiness-Project