The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (33 page)

The Purpose in the Tenth Room

Replenishing your inner energy is critical to maintaining your sense of self. It’s an essential part of your well-being. Only by taking time to think can you possibly figure out what matters most to you. Once you find that answer you’ll be able to reemerge with a direction, with your inner compass reset. Then it’s possible to be happy no matter where you are and what you’re doing, since you can keep the perspective of that bigger picture in mind even doing the little have-tos that exist in every room.

That is the true activity in the Tenth Room: the
thinking
you do there, about your life and your role in the universe. Of course we often find ourselves ruminating about the people, the problems, or the things that are bugging us. A boyfriend who hasn’t called, a child not behaving the way you’d like, a checking account without enough money in it. And while each of these is a valid concern, and crucial to resolve, so is the following series of questions, which often gets pushed off the to-do list altogether:

These are the questions you address in the Tenth Room. So it’s not only a “time-out” from the hustle and bustle of the house, or the problems in other rooms. Assume all your other problems are out of mind for one moment (the psychic equivalent of having all the other rooms neat, or at least taken care of, as improbable as that sounds): Now what? What is your purpose?

We know how daunting this question sounds. And how difficult it is
to find the space to ponder it. Sometimes it can take years to get to the point where you are ready. And even then it takes enormous discipline to shut out the noise from the other nine rooms.

Other people and problems tend to follow you into this space. But your job is to shut the door on them and keep them out. This is about you and you alone. Don’t allow the people you love, or anything else, to crash through into your Tenth Room. In other words, don’t give the key to the Tenth Room away. Don’t invite them in, emotionally speaking. This is your space alone! And now that you are there, you have the opportunity to ponder your purpose. But how? How do you get to this enormous question? The first step is to start by figuring out what your passion is, or just what it is that makes your heart sing. Because your passion (any activity you adore, or that sustains you) is what leads to purpose, and ultimately to meaning.

The meaningful life.

You want to figure that out, and it’s never too late. Like Abby, who went back to med school in her forties after having a career and three kids, you can make a change if it’s your passion and your purpose.

Your passions will change and evolve, especially with babies and little children, who are likely to fill your every free minute during those early, precious child-rearing years. But we are here to tell you that they grow up and move out, and that’s a good thing. You’ll always love them, to the point of aching at times, your heart will feel so full. But you won’t always fill your day with the “Mommy needs” and then…what? That’s your job to figure out. Get to the Tenth Room, take a seat (or do whatever it is that helps quiet your mind), and think, just think,
What is it I want to do?

For me, the Tenth Room is when I bike or swim or jog, and the thinking I do during these long relaxing exertions is what led to writing this book. I joke that I was “writing while riding” and then I would come home and let the words and thoughts exit through my fingers onto the keyboard. But the thinking was done on the open road, when my mind was free of clutter. So I do my thinking while moving through space, on a bike, or jogging or swimming. For me the passion is both the physical act of moving and the intellectual act of writing. The purpose is to help women feel em
powered. That gives meaning to my life. Catherine adds that her work, helping women make choices they didn’t think they had, is another way of empowering women and adding meaning to her life.

Think about it: your life, and what
you
want it to be all about. Is it your role in helping others? That can mean your children, your husband, your extended family, other people in your community, your church, your god—whoever or whatever it is that brings you a sense of purpose. Or it may be some other way of having an impact on your world or being a catalyst for social change. No one is here to tell you. Only you can answer that question, and whatever it is, it’s valid. Then the purpose of your actions, big and small, will be clear and become meaningful. And that leads to a happier you, in every room of your house.

Edith’s Excellent Adventure…and Yours

M
ost people know Edith Wharton’s
The House of Mirth
as well
as her best-known book,
The Age of Innocence,
for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. There’s a lesser-known short story by Edith Wharton that was the source of the quote at the front of this book, called “The Fulness of Life.”

The story itself is significant because it talks about what a woman might feel like and think about right as she is dying and enters eternity. The lessons from the story are both profound and disturbing, first because we rarely ever want to think about what it might be like to look back on our lives and assess whether or not we found true love, happiness, and lived every day to its fullest. The upsetting part for us is that Wharton’s message (that she waited for footsteps that never came) could be interpreted as a woman deciding to settle, by staying with a man despite the fact that he would never know her fully. In other words, they were not soul mates. Our point is that no one
can
ever know you fully. You’re lucky if you ever get to know yourself fully, and that brings us to the other half of the story: about the rooms not yet discovered. Wharton says the woman in the story wished someone would find those unexplored rooms. We would say that is your job, to explore and discover all aspects of your own potential, and that if you don’t, you may be missing out on the fullness of life.

Let’s Revisit the Story Together…

In “The Fulness of Life,” a dying woman reflects on the “fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving.” She has mostly mundane thoughts of a to-do list left undone, the verse not written and the bills not paid, and a flash of gratitude that no one will ever ask her again “What’s for dinner tonight?” She thinks of her spouse not in terms of what she’ll miss but in terms of what she won’t: “She should never again hear the creaking of her husband’s boots—those horrible boots.”

When the nurse pronounces her dead, she enters a valley with a serpentine river and a gorgeous landscape, and she suddenly realizes, “And so death is not the end after all…” As she gazes out onto the vastness of eternity, the Spirit of Life appears before her and says: “Have you never really known what it is to live?”

She answers, “I have never known that fulness of life which we all feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not been without scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which comes to one sometimes far out at sea.”

They discuss what the fullness of life means, and she admits how difficult it is to put into words: “Love and sympathy are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure those are the right ones, and so few people really know what they mean.”

The Spirit asks about her marriage, and she says she was “fond” of her husband, “just as I was fond of my grandmother,” and adds that it was a very “incomplete affair,” though their friends thought of them as a “very happy couple.” Then she explains: “I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: There is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”

Our Eureka! Moment

I found this quote after Catherine and I finished writing the proposal for this book and had a “Eureka!” moment. I immediately called Catherine and said, “Read this! Turns out we’re on to something—no less a literary light than Edith Wharton agrees with our depiction of a woman’s inner emotional life as rooms in a house!”

When Catherine first read the story, she felt sad for the narrator, because the ending appears to have an unhappy twist. The Spirit of Life asks the woman if her husband ever got beyond the family sitting-room, and she says, “Never…and the worst of it was that he was quite content to remain there.” He thought it “perfectly beautiful,” she says, “and sometimes when he was admiring its commonplace furniture…I felt like crying out to him: ‘Fool, will you never guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has crossed but that might be yours to live in, could you but find the handle of the door?’”

The Spirit asks if she shared her “scattered hints” of the fullness of life with her husband, and she says, no, never, since he had little sophistication, while her best moments were found in the subtler things: the perfume of a flower, the verse of Dante and Shakespeare, the beauty of a sunset, a calm day at sea. In fact, she tells the Spirit, no one ever touched “a single note of that strange melody which seemed sleeping in my soul.”

She is then offered a “soul mate” to share eternity with, someone who will finish her sentences, read her thoughts, appreciate all the same things. But she decides that she must wait for her husband instead. The Spirit of Life tells her that her husband will not understand her any better in eternity than he did on earth, and she protests that it doesn’t matter, since “he always thought that he understood me,” and in that moment she realizes that understanding
him
and being needed by him was enough for her. And will be, forever.

The Spirit asks her to “consider that you are now choosing for eternity” to be with her husband. She scoffs, “Choosing! I should have thought
that
you
knew better than that. How can I help myself? He will expect to find me here when he comes, and he would never believe you if you told him that I had gone away with someone else.” And so she sits down and waits for the creaking of his boots.

The story appears on first read to be about the main character resigning herself to a “helpmate” vision of a woman’s life, but the ending isn’t as much about her lack of choice (the Spirit did give her a choice) as it is about her deciding that she did truly love her husband, despite all his shortcomings. And she loved being needed, being
his
soul mate.

Catherine says that while this story was written more than a century ago, it’s as relevant as if it were written today. In fact Wharton’s character could easily have been a patient of Catherine’s any given morning, recounting a dream. It’s the topic women want to discuss most, this question of what they can expect from a partner, how do we really connect with somebody else, and even, what is love? Catherine explains, “People think the idea of a soul mate or the perfect partner will solve all their problems and make them happy and fulfilled for life.” But though someone else can complement you, they can’t complete you. You have to complete yourself.

We believe that Wharton’s story is about realizing you always have a choice, about how you act or react to the events in your life. Your life is what it is, and it’s never going to be perfect. Her narrator gets to decide how to define her role within her life, and even her afterlife. Choice is the key here. Do you want to clean a room? Close that door? Live with a mess? The choice is yours.

What “Handle” Have You Not Yet Turned?

In Wharton’s view of a woman’s life, the house has rooms not yet explored, and we’d say those aren’t for others to find or explore, but for
you
to do so. The room in your house where no one has gone could be a new interest, passion, or relationship—some part of your life or yourself not yet tapped or discovered. The narrator is implying she is disappointed that
her husband never went into those inner chambers. But in our version of the house, it’s not his job; it’s for
you
to discover, and it’s your life’s journey to do so.

In that Tenth Room, you need space to be quiet and peaceful enough to ask yourself,
When everyone else is taken care of and every other detail has been attended to, what do I want? What do I reach for?
Once you answer that question—and have the time to devote to “the answer”—then you can discover your passion, lead your authentic life, and find meaning beyond the day-to-day details. The fullness of life can be yours, but you need to be the one to reach for it. Even make it a priority.

How Do You Live Life to the “Fullest”?

Imagine you are Wharton’s character and life is leaving your body…What would you miss? What would you look back on and think: Those were my “perfect moments.” How could you have experienced more of them? And what could you have given up? What time wasters should you have skipped to fit in more fullness-of-life moments?

Imagine you are on your deathbed. It may sound like a morbid exercise, but it’s meant to be a life-affirming one, since it allows you to think about the big picture and what matters most. I find the chance to think this way whenever I take a yoga class, since the final pose is called the corpse pose, or Savasana. True yogis will say this is the hardest pose, since although it simply involves lying down on your back, the challenging part is clearing your head and chasing away all the to-dos and random thoughts that try to find a place there, since you are supposed to be cleansing your mind completely and preparing for a rebirth. For me, the “I regret” list is hardest to turn off, as in “I regret that brownie! I regret that dumb comment I made! I regret rushing through a meeting or not walking my daughter to school more often.”

This is usually chased by my “I wish I’d…” list, as in I wish I were a better person, a nicer wife, a more patient mother, a more creative editor and writer, a more empathetic friend, and a more visionary leader. These thoughts are equally noisy and hard to quiet, but they also remind
me of how I want to lead my life; and when I finally do walk out of yoga class and back to my busy life I am determined not to allow the petty annoyances to get me down and to try to be a better person.

Catherine would say, think about it in reverse: If you were to look back on your life, what would you regret
not
doing or
not
saying? Make that a priority today.

One Final Pearl: It’s All in You!

Now that you’ve completed the rehab of your emotional house—Tenth Room included—you get the final pearl, the one that is truly the most treasured, and it’s this:
It’s all in you.

You have the power to change your patterns of behavior, appreciate your happiest moments, and find
your
fullness of life. That leaves one remaining question about the idea of
It’s all in you
and that question is: What is
It
?

Answer: You are the only one who gets to decide that.

The story about a woman waiting for footsteps that never come is both sad and hopeful. Think about it this way: You can get up and take the first steps—make them your
own
footsteps—toward your vision of a happy inner self, to find your passion and your purpose. And if you catch yourself waiting for others to make you happy—waiting for those footsteps—you could spend a very long time waiting.

Instead, remind yourself:
It’s all in you.
All you have to do is take the first step, and then another, and another and see where they lead.