I recently read the book, "The Happiness Project". People ask, why would I read such a book, am I unhappy? No. But I do believe I could be happy, at peace, grateful, and joyful more hours out of the day. I picked up the "The Happiness Project", well more like downloaded it to my Kindle, because someone suggested it. Almost immediately I enjoyed it and from the beginning it was because Gretchen does a great job of making it ok to want to be happier, even if the world wasn't already ending around you.
I particularly liked her argument that to make happiness a practice now, when life isn't horrible, helps us to learn and embrace the things that make us happy. The idea is when that horrible phone call does come, and in some form it will come, we have this knowledge on which to fall back. In this Happiness Project, Gretchen focused on different areas of her life for a month at a time, for a whole year. If interested at all I encourage you to get her book and check out her blog, http://www.happiness-project.com/.
She kept coming back to one point that I want to focus on in this posting. She had 12 Personal Commandments and the first one was "Be Gretchen". I will admit that my struggle with how to "Be Christine", is a key issue in the times I am unhappy or frustrated.
Towards the end of the book, Gretchen states, "I realized the importance of my First Commandment, "Be Gretchen". As great minds throughout the ages have pointed out, one of our most pressing concerns should be to discover the laws of our own nature. I had to build my happiness on the foundation of my character; I had to acknowledge what really made me happy; not what I wished made me happy. One of the biggest surprises of the happiness project was just how hard it was to know myself. I'd always been slightly exasperated by philosophers' constant emphasis on what seemed to me to be a fairly obvious question, but in the end I realized that I would spend my whole life grappling with the question of how to "Be Gretchen".
I think the key part of that statement is "...not what I wished made me happy". Throughout the book increasing happiness meant always identifying, what does Gretchen like to do? Not, what should she like to do because other people enjoy it. Personally I struggle with this often. I have a good idea of what I like to do. But, are there other things I do, that don't add anything to my day or week, because other's want to do it? And how much of that should we do to make other people happy? It turns out other people's happiness has a lot of effect on our own.
So, in the coming holiday season I am going to think about this commandment and in trying to remind myself to "Be Christine", maybe I'll learn a little more about what "Be Christine" means.
I hope you all learn how to "Be Yourselves" a little more each day and appreciate the person you are, not the person you wish to be.
Rubin, G. (2009). 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. HarpersCollins Publishers, New York: NY.
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