In effort to satisfy that nagging feeling I get when I think about New Years Resolutions and my own guilt over my ever-expanding collection of self-help books, I finally picked up my copy of Gretchin Rubin’s The Happiness Project and have begun mapping out what I feel would be a “happier,” more satisfying version of my own life.
“I decided to dedicate a year to happiness,” Gretchin Rubin writes on her blog about the motive of her project and new book. Author of The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin is a Yale Law graduate and my newfound inspiration for the launch of my own happiness pursuit. I know, call me a biter, but I can’t help but think we’d all be a little less bitter if we spent more time focusing on what makes us happy. The Happiness Project is Rubin’s reflection on a year she spent focusing on finding her own happiness. From health, organization, attitude, spirituality, friends, family and love, Rubin dedicated a month to each new resolution. Creating her own commandments, holding herself to a daily one-sentence journal entry and keeping the whole situation light-hearted by referring to her “secrets of adulthood,” Rubin had the whole process organized into a twelve-month project.
A twelve month program reminds me a little bit of something you’d hear at an AA Meeting, but perhaps sobering up step-by-step to the joy one should have in his or her life is not the worst of ideas. I vividly remember as a little kid, the tangents I would go on telling my mother, and really anyone I could get to listen, what I was going to be when I grew up. As a little tike I had it all down I was “gonna’ be a veterinary and a model, and a fire fighter and I [was] gonna’ travel the world. “ At about 14 my vision for myself had become a little less eccentric but far more vague: “Whatever I do, I want to be happy.” It hasn’t evolved much since thought it needs to. Damn near 20, I am in college getting a better sense of what it is I am good at and interested in, I realize I also need to be defining the whole happiness part too.
To complement, and I’m sure to get a little self promotion in with her book, Rubin has created a website, entitled “The Happiness Project Toolbox,” where readers can start, chart and blog about their own “Happiness Projects” as well as read up on the projects of fellow bloggers. I’m not going to deny my own excitement about the whole thing, I am a self-proclaimed nerd when it comes to the self-help section of any bookstore and I do like the idea of starting my own “Happiness Project.” This is why, as of yesterday, I have joined the web community of fellow happiness seekers on happinessprojecttoolbox.com. So far I have six Personal Commandments, the two most pressing being “#5. Whatever the present is, be there,” and “#6. Sleep.” Being a noobie to the whole adult scene, I only have one “Secret of Adulthood” but I’d say it is relevant in learning how to feed myself properly: “You sure do spend a lot of money on food, so you might as well be buying the good stuff.”
Granted, my route so far in this journey to happiness is not yet as nicely charted as say, Rubin herself, but two days has given me a rough outline and like she said “every project is going to look different.” Well of course, unlike Rubin I am minus two kids, husband and apartment on The Upper East Side; but when it comes to having the desire to acknowledge every moment of happiness there is and create many more, I am right there. I wish I could get my roommates in on this project. We could start by the self-responsibility of removing the film of food that acquires on the stovetop daily, and then we could all bond over the experience of not waking up to each other’s filth.
I’m excited to see how my progress pans out, my focus for this month is my health: mental, physical and spiritual. I mean sure, I’d love to wake up and look like Beyonce like every other women, but I’d settle for waking up feeling like Toni the tiger over a bowl of frosted flakes, and that’s why I’m starting where all good things do: bed. My focus this week: sleep.
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