The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

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.”
    But though at times I felt dissatisfied, that something was missing, I also never forgot how fortunate I was. When I woke up in the middle of the night, as I often did, I’d walk from one room to another to gaze at my sleeping husband tangled in the sheets and my daughters surrounded by their stuffed animals, all safe. I had everything I could possibly want—yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had. I didn’t want to keep taking these days for granted. The words of the writer Colette had haunted me for years: “What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” I didn’t want to look back, at the end of my life or after some great catastrophe, and think, “How happy I used to be then, if only I’d realized it.”
    I needed to think about this. How could I discipline myself to feel grateful for my ordinary day? How could I set a higher standard for myself as a wife, a mother, a writer, a friend? How could I let go of everyday annoyances to keep a larger, more transcendent perspective? I could barely remember to stop at the drugstore to buy toothpaste—it didn’t seem realistic to think that I could incorporate these high aims into my everyday routine.
    The bus was hardly moving, but I could hardly keep pace with my own thoughts. “I’ve got to tackle this,” I told myself. “As soon as I have some free time, I should start a happiness project.” But I never had any free time. When life was taking its ordinary course, it was hard to remember what really mattered; if I wanted a happiness project, I’d have to make the time. I had a brief vision of myself living for a month on a picturesque, windswept island, where each day I would gather seashells, read Aristotle, and write in an elegant parchment journal. Nope, I admitted, that’s not going to happen. I needed to find a way to do it here and now . I needed to change the lens through which I viewed everything familiar.
    All these thoughts flooded through my mind, and as I sat on that crowded bus, I grasped two things: I wasn’t as happy as I could be, and my life wasn’t going to change unless I made it change. In that single moment, with that realization, I decided to dedicate a year to trying to be happier.
     
    I made up my mind on a Tuesday morning, and by Wednesday afternoon, I had a stack of library books teetering on the edge of my desk. I could hardly find room for them; my tiny office, perched on the roof of our apartment building, was already too crowded with reference materials for the Kennedy biography I was writing, mixed with notices from my daughter Eliza’s first-grade teacher about class trips, strep throat, and a food drive.
    I couldn’t just jump into this happiness project. I had a lot to learn before I was ready for my year to begin. After my first few weeks of heavyreading, as I toyed with different ideas about how to set up my experiment, I called my younger sister, Elizabeth.
    After listening to a twenty-minute disquisition on my initial thoughts on happiness, my sister said, “I don’t think you realize just how weird you are—but,” she added hastily, “in a good way.”
    “Everyone is weird. That’s why everyone’s happiness project would be different. We’re all idiosyncratic.”
    “Maybe, but I just don’t think you realize how funny it is to hear you talk about it.”
    “Why is it funny?”
    “It’s just that you’re approaching the question of happiness in such a dogged, systematic way.”
    I didn’t understand what she meant. “You mean how I’m trying to turn goals like ‘Contemplate death’ or ‘Embrace now’ into action items?”
    “Exactly,” she answered. “I don’t even know what an ‘action item’ is .”
    “That’s business school jargon.”
    “Okay, whatever. All I’m saying is, your happiness project reveals more about you than you realize.”
    Of course she was right. They say that people teach what they need to learn. By adopting the role of happiness teacher, if only for myself, I was trying to find the method to conquer my particular faults and limitations.
    It was time to expect more of myself.