Which One Are You? An Earnest Treatise on the Pursuit of Happiness

            This is one of the fabled “Boblets,” which I’m beginning to realize are not necessarily going to be shorter than bona fide Bobs.  You think it’s easy rolling the universe into a ball?  Maybe later I’ll condense this a bit and make it into a newspaper piece, but for right now I had something to say about happiness and wanted to say it.

Which One Are You?  An Earnest Treatise on the Pursuit of Happiness

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

            I looked that up and it was attributed to Abraham Lincoln.  That’s a shame, because I’ve always had a soft spot for Abe.  I’d thought it was by Henry Ford and that was fine with me because from the history he already sounded like a jerk.

The quote presumes if you’re unhappy it must be your own fault, and that’s what makes my butt hurt.  Who wouldn’t rather be happy?  You think I like sitting down here in the garden eating worms and sucking entire galaxies into the abyss of my despair?

That’s an exaggeration.  I’m not always a black hole.  Just mostly.  Sometimes I find myself singing on a Saturday morning and realize I’m happy for no reason other than it’s Saturday morning.  But my default mood is a kind of Ain’t-Complainin’ neutral, shifting down toward glum or up toward cheerful depending on circumstances, health and relative humidity. 

Anyway I don’t suppose I’ve ever thought that hard about happiness before, but this has been an awful, awful year and I needed help.  Thus it was that I recently found myself reading a bestseller called The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin, a sort of how-to manual on joy.

            I started reading the book with my accustomed negativity.  The first chapter seemed to be mostly about closets.  Hello?  I acknowledge that a reasonable level of tidiness, varying according to individual taste, is necessary for comfort, but how much ecstasy can a woman hope to achieve from a really organized closet?

            That’s the thing about these self-help books, they always mix the homely with the profound.  I remember reading one by the great and fluffy Helen Gurley Brown that admonished you to cherish your friends, because the people who love you are your most precious resource; and to keep rinsing until all of the shampoo is out of your hair.

            Ms. Rubin, though layers less fluffy, deals out similar mixtures:  “Do good, feel good” is side by side with “Bring a sweater.”

            But as I read on I began to understand the practicality of this sort of advice.  Her point about the sweater is that it’s impossible to be happy when you’re freezing.  Physical misery is one of the more basic deterrents to happiness. 

I have noticed this about shoes and certain items of underwear.  I bought a pair of black high heels with adorable little bows during one of my girlier moments.  They’re beautiful but they hurt, and not one day I’ve worn them has been anything less than tragic.  Similarly, some of my unhappiest business days have ended with me thrashing around at traffic lights trying to liberate myself from bras, which are instruments of torture left over from a barbaric past that also brought us the hair shirt and Spanish Inquisition. 

Anyway, physical comfort does contribute to happiness, and the book is full of useful pointers like that.  Take variety:  We think we like it more than we actually do.  If you were to stock up on two weeks’ worth of snacks you might buy everything from burritos to stuffed mushrooms, but if you go to the store each afternoon for something to eat you will almost always come out unwrapping the same Moon Pie. 

The point is, it may well improve your happiness to allow yourself to return from your next shopping trip with eight identical black tank tops if that’s what you wear every day.  Anyone who has ever had a psychotic episode in the light fixture aisle of Home Depot can tell you about the anxiety of too much choice.

Ms. Rubin also urges you to reexamine your basic beliefs – which she calls heuristics or True Rules – not so much to discard the ones that aren’t true as to modify the ones that don’t contribute to happiness.  For example, one of her husband’s – “The first one is not the right one” – is a keeper, she says, because though it’s probably not true it’s a comforting thing to say to a friend who has just been turned down for a job.

            I thought about my own heuristics and was sourly amused to find that most of them had to do with food:  “You can’t unsalt,” and “The only way to win at Captain D’s is not to go in.”  (I stand by that one.)

            I did reframe one of my nongastronomic heuristics to contribute to happiness.  Old:  Everyone hates me because of my vile personality.  New:  Everyone hates me because they envy my fascinating life.  What does it matter which is true?  Now every time another friend dumps me I just clamp my eyes shut and chant:  “Livin’ the dream!”

            Anyway, the most important point of the book was not these little tricks but the idea that happiness is, too, at least partly a matter of will.  One of the tenets of the book is:  “Act like you want to feel.”

            Of course you can’t be happy just by deciding to, but Ms. Rubin says it’s not a bad start; even faking a laugh or forcing a smile for some reason raises the spirits – and then of course you can always try her little tricks.

            Furthermore, she points out, happiness is the socially conscious choice:  Happy people make others happy, whereas unhappy people drag others down.    

I thought about that and it’s true.  I know slightly a young man who’s always happy whatever his circumstances and, rather better, another who’s always miserable.  The train wreck is smarter and funnier and really I like him more, but at worst he says something mean I have to forgive him for (because he’s unhappy) and at best he’s so gloomy I do somersaults to cheer him up.  So it’s actually less work talking to the dumb guy.

So Ms. Rubin’s stance is that pursuing happiness is not just our constitutional right, it’s a virtue.  She cites the case of a young French nun, St. Therese of Lisieux, who was canonized in 1925 for little more than what sounded like Extreme Perkiness.  She didn’t lead any armies or get crucified upside down.  She was just real, real cheerful.

One happiness trick Ms. Rubin recommends is reading disaster accounts – you know, the kind of memoir that begins, “I’ll never forget the day I was diagnosed.”  The idea is, they make you feel grateful it isn’t happening to you, and grateful people are happier.

I can attest to that because of the tornados that tore through here in April.  People whose houses were left standing almost universally used the word “blessed” to describe their feelings.  That included me.  In fact, I felt so blessed I didn’t start to whine until precisely the sixth day without electricity or flush toilets.  (That was the day it rained on me while I was burying rotting chicken from the freezer in the front flowerbed.)

But the point was brought home to me more vividly a couple of weeks ago when my husband told me about a fender-bender he’d had on the way to work.  He’d been following too close, he admitted, and when his cell phone rang he rear-ended the car in front of him while he fumbled to answer it.

My husband didn’t think he’d done that much damage but of course he stopped and so did the car in front of him.  The other driver got out and my husband, who had seen from behind that he was very short, now realized he was a dwarf.  The guy walked around his car and all he said was, “I’m not happy.”

“So,” my husband concluded, “I asked him, ‘Which one are you, then?’ ”

Get it?  The Seven Dwarves?  My husband hadn’t had an accident at all, it was just some crap joke he’d read on Facebook.   We were dressed up to go out to dinner and I laughed so hard I cried off all my eye makeup. 

It was only later I realized it wasn’t that damn funny.  I had just been easy to please because the last time my husband admitted he’d followed too close it had cost us $700.

            So.  I’ll conclude by recommending the book, and admitting I’m a convert to this happiness thing myself.  Maybe I’m not genetically predisposed to perkiness, and maybe some rotten things have happened to me in the past year.  But I can anyway try.  

Since the job is open, maybe I’ll be Happy.

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays happily in the dirt.  More or less.