The Happiness Project (31 page)

On the very last day of the month, I had an important realization: my Fourth Splendid Truth. Jamie and I were having dinner with a guy we knew slightly. He asked me what I was working on, and after I described the happiness project, he said, in polite disagreement, that he himself subscribed to John Stuart Mill’s view—and he gave the precise quotation from Mill, I was impressed—“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

One of the problems of thinking about happiness all the time is that I’ve developed rather decided views. I wanted to pound the table and yell, “No, no, NO!” Instead, I managed to nod and say in a mild voice, “Yes, a lot of people take that view. I can’t say that I agree.”

I could see it in the guy’s face:
John Stuart Mill v. Gretchen Rubin
. Hmmm…who’s more likely to be right? But, in my experience at least, thinking about happiness had made me far happier than I was before I gave happiness much consideration. Now, Mill may have been referring to the state of “flow” identified by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In flow, it’s true, people are completely absorbed, so focused on their tasks that they forget themselves at the perfect balance of challenge and skill. But I think that Mill meant, or people generally believe, that thinking about your happiness makes you self-absorbed; you’re not thinking about other people, work, or anything other than your own satisfaction. Or perhaps Mill meant that happiness comes as a consequence of pursuing other goals, such as love and work, and shouldn’t be a goal in itself.

Of course it’s not enough to sit around wanting to be happy; you must make the effort to take steps toward happiness by acting with more love, finding work you enjoy, and all the rest. But for me, asking myself whether I was happy had been a crucial step toward cultivating my happiness more wisely through my actions. Also, only through
recognizing
my happiness did I really
appreciate
it. Happiness depends partly on external circumstances, and it also depends on how you view those circumstances.

I’d thought about this question many times during the course of the year, but finally it hit me that
this
was my Fourth Splendid Truth:
You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy
. Then it struck me that the Fourth Splendid Truth has a corollary:
You’re happy if you think you’re happy
.

And that means thinking about happiness, no matter what John Stuart Mill said.

Pay Attention

M
INDFULNESS

Meditate on koans.

Examine True Rules.

Stimulate the mind in new ways.

Keep a food diary.

W
hen I told people I was working on a book about happiness, the single most common response was “You should spend some time studying Buddhism.” (A close second was “So are you drinking a bottle of wine every night?”) The Dalai Lama’s
The Art of Happiness
was the book most often recommended to me.

I’d always been intrigued by Buddhism, so I was eager to learn more about both the religion and the life of the Buddha. But although I admired many of its teachings, I didn’t feel much deep connection to Buddhism, which, at its heart, urges detachment as a way to alleviate suffering. Although there is a place for
love and commitment, these bonds are considered fetters that bind us to lives of sorrow—which of course they do. Instead, I’m an adherent of the Western tradition of cultivating deep passions and profound attachments; I didn’t want to detach, I wanted to embrace; I didn’t want to loosen, I wanted to deepen. Also, the Western tradition emphasizes the expression and the perfection of each unique, individual soul; not so in the Eastern tradition.

Nevertheless, studying Buddhism made me realize the significance of some concepts that I’d overlooked. The most important was mindfulness—the cultivation of conscious, nonjudgmental awareness.

I have several tendencies that run counter to mindfulness. I constantly multitask in ways that pull me away from my present experience. I often run on automatic pilot—arriving home with no recollection of having gone from point A to point B. (This sometimes terrifies me when I’m driving; I have no recollection of watching the road.) I tend to dwell on anxieties or hopes for the future, instead of staying fully aware in the present moment. I often break or spill things because I’m not paying attention. When I’m introduced to someone in a social situation, I often forget the person’s name as soon as I hear it. I finish eating before I’ve even registered the taste of my food.

In September a jarring experience had reminded me of the importance of mindfulness. After a pleasant family weekend, spent mostly going to children’s birthday parties (three in two days), I was walking down the hallway after putting both girls to bed. All of a sudden, as I headed to my desk to check my e-mails, I had the sensation that I was zooming back into my body. It was as if I had just returned from a two-week trip away from myself. The very hallway in which I stood seemed unfamiliar, yet I’d been living my ordinary life the whole time. It was very, very unnerving. If I was just getting back home—where had I been? I needed to do a better job of staying in the moment.

Mindfulness brings many benefits: scientists point out that it calms the mind and elevates brain function, it gives clarity and vividness to present
experience, it may help people break unhealthy habits, and it can soothe troubled spirits and lift people’s moods. It reduces stress and chronic pain. It makes people happier, less defensive, and more engaged with others.

One highly effective way to practice mindfulness is through meditation, which is recommended by Buddhists as a spiritual exercise and also by happiness experts of all sorts. Nevertheless, I just couldn’t bring myself to try meditation. (I took yoga twice a week, but my class didn’t emphasize the mental aspect of yoga.)

“I just can’t believe you’re not practicing meditation,” a friend chided me. “If you’re studying happiness, you really
have
to try it.” She herself was a veteran of a ten-day silent meditation retreat. “The fact that you don’t want to try meditation means that you need it desperately.”

“You’re probably right.” I sighed. “But I just can’t bring myself to do it. It holds no appeal for me.”

Everyone’s happiness project is unique. I enjoyed posting to my blog six days a week—a task that some people wouldn’t dream of undertaking—but sit in silence for fifteen minutes each day, as my friend urged? I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Another friend made an eloquent case for why I should spend more time in nature. Both arguments left me cold. When I’d started planning my happiness project, I told myself that I would try everything, but I’d quickly realized that this goal was neither possible nor desirable. Perhaps I’d try meditation in Happiness Project II, but for now I would seek happiness in the ways that seemed most natural to me.

There were other ways to harness the power of mindfulness, however, apart from meditation. I was already using my Resolutions Chart, a practice that led me to act more mindfully through the purposeful review of my actions and my thoughts. I filled in my chart at the end of the day, at a quiet time when I was undistracted and alone—though, given the nature of my personality, this period of self-examination felt more like conversation with Jiminy Cricket than communion with the universe. This month, I sought to find other strategies that would help me pay attention and stay in the moment. I also hoped to stimulate my brain to think in new
ways—to jolt myself out of automatic behavior and to awaken sleepy parts of my mind.

MEDITATE ON KOANS.

Although I didn’t take up meditation, I did find certain aspects of Buddhism fascinating. I was struck by the symbolism of Buddhism, the way the Buddha was sometimes portrayed by an empty seat, a pair of footprints, a tree, or a pillar of fire to signify that he’d passed beyond form. I loved the numbered lists that pop up throughout Buddhism: the Triple Refuge; the Noble Eightfold Path; the Four Noble Truths; the eight auspicious symbols: parasol, golden fish, treasure vase, lotus, conch shell, endless knot, victory banner, and dharma wheel.

The aspect that intrigued me most, however, was the study of Zen koans (rhymes with Ben Cohen’s). A koan is a question or a statement that can’t be understood logically. Zen Buddhist monks meditate on koans as a way to abandon dependence on reason in their pursuit of enlightenment. The most famous koan is “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” Another is “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Or “What was your face before your parents were born?” A koan can’t be grasped by reason or explained in words; meditating on koans promotes mindful thinking because it’s not possible to comprehend their meaning with familiar, conventional logic.

After I learned about koans, I realized that I already had my own list of personal koans—I just hadn’t thought of them that way. For years, in another example of seemingly pointless note taking, I’d been keeping a list of enigmatic lines, and in odd moments, I’d think about them. I was surprised to see how many I’d collected. My favorites:

These fragments haunted me. They floated through my mind at odd times—when I was waiting on a subway platform or staring at my computer screen—and they seemed strangely relevant in many circumstances.

The personal koan I reflected on most often was a Spanish proverb quoted by Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s
Life of Johnson:
“He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.” I’d read that line years ago, and I often found myself turning it over in my mind. Much later, I’d discovered a reference in Henry David Thoreau’s
Journal
in which he echoed Johnson: “It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves…. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.”

With time, I think I began to grasp the meaning of these two koans, which had profound implications for a happiness project. I was trudging up the stairs of the library when I thought, “She who would find the happiness of the Indies must carry the happiness of the Indies with her.” I couldn’t look outside myself for happiness. The secret wasn’t in the Indies or in Labrador but under my own roof; if I wanted to find happiness, I had to carry happiness with me.

Ruminating on my koans didn’t bring me any closer to satori, the
lasting enlightenment promised by Zen (at least not as far as I could tell), but it did ignite my imagination. Because koans forced me to challenge the usual, straightforward boxes of meaning, they pushed me to
think
about
thinking.
That in turn brought me the delicious intellectual happiness that comes from grappling with an expansive, difficult question.

EXAMINE TRUE RULES.

Part of the challenge of mindfulness was to keep myself from falling into mechanical thoughts and actions. Instead of walking through life on autopilot, I wanted to question the assumptions I made without noticing.

My research into cognitive science led me to the concept of heuristics. Heuristics are mental rules of thumb, the quick, commonsense principles you apply to solve a problem or make a decision. For example, the recognition heuristic holds that if you’re faced with two objects and you recognize one and don’t recognize the other, you assume that the recognized one is of higher value. So if you’ve heard of Munich but you haven’t heard of Minden, you assume that Munich is the larger German city; if you’ve heard of Rice Krispies cereal but you haven’t heard of Wild Oats cereal, you assume that Rice Krispies is the more popular brand.

Usually heuristics are helpful, but in some situations our cognitive instincts mislead us. Take the availability heuristic: people predict the likelihood of an event based on how easily they can come up with an example. This is often useful (is a tornado likely to hit Manhattan?), but sometimes a person’s judgment is skewed because the vividness of examples makes an event seem more likely than it actually is. A friend of mine, for example, is hypervigilant about not eating anything that might contain raw eggs. She practically went into hysterics when she found out that her mother-in-law had allowed her kids to eat raw cookie batter. Why? Because her aunt got salmonella twenty-five years ago. This same friend, by the way, never wears a seat belt.