Ooh La La

"I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger ..."

It's Memorial Day weekend - specifically, a gorgeous blue-skied sunny Sunday with cool breezes and perfect temperatures. Denver has that coastal feeling it often gets in the late spring and early summer - just a waft of salt air and I'd be convinced the beach was just around the corner. There's something about the quality of light here - it's so white somehow, like the light in Southern California, and so bright it hurts.



I'm inside, as usual, and doing work (though obviously also taking time to do other things online, as is my wont when I'm in the office on a weekend). It seems that the universe has conspired to make my last few months with the Fund an insane whirlwind. Put it this way: I'm certainly earning my paycheck. We're short-staffed currently by two people - Doug's on leave and my coworker Stephanie left abruptly a couple of weeks ago to move to Minnesota with her ailing girlfriend. It wasn't a happy time for any of us, as she handled things fairly immaturely and screwed us all over in the process. But we're getting used to the additional load and I'm trying to make time to enjoy things outside of work so that I don't get dragged down too much by the stress. So far my success is middling - I haven't collapsed in a nervy puddle of tears, but I've also been packing on the pounds just when I want to be losing them, as my old reliable coping mechanism of stuffing my face with junk has come back with a vengeance. Someday I'll sort this out, but evidently not now. I think the best I can do is remain conscious of what I'm doing and keep trying to fight it off.

The other week I read a book I'd been waiting on for a long time, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. I am increasingly convinced that happiness is a matter of will, assuming that you're not chemically depressed or under some kind of extenuating tragic circumstances. My late and beloved grandmother is a perfect example. She was a determinedly optimistic person who insisted on emphasizing the positive, as the old song goes, and it showed. She remained cheerful even in the last year of her life, after a stroke robbed her of speech and independent locomotion. She lifted the spirits of others even as they came to the nursing home to cheer her up. As a child and adolescent, I thought she was daffy for wanting to focus on the bright side all the time; I saw her willful cheer as naive, obtuse; a refusal to see things as they really are. Now, though, I wish I could sit down with her and let her know that I admire that quality and aspire to emulate it.

I'm not a naturally effervescent person. I don't look for the silver lining or keep on the sunny side of life. Neither is Rubin; she has an idyllic life (she writes for a living, which is her passion; she's married to a man she adores and has two little girls and an apartment in Manhattan) but like any of us she worries, nags, and complains her days away. She writes that one day she had an epiphany and realized that she wanted to be happier. Hence the Happiness Project, a yearlong foray into the study and practice of happiness through resolutions, splendid truths, and personal commandments. It's a fascinating story - a self-help book through the lens of a memoir, which (at least for me) makes it go down a bit easier.

I haven't by any means started my own Happiness Project, but I do feel that the last few weeks I've been more conscious of trying to express and amplify the moments when I am happy, and to try to create more joy. I picked up my knitting again and figured out how to purl for the first time, and I'm in the middle of a rather awful scarf that I am using purely for practice. I bought a pretty little book and began keeping a daily journal, in which I force myself to be methodical and keep the entries short so that I will maintain the practice. I have made myself smile, deliberately, when I notice fresh air or beautiful flowers or something interesting and delightful. I joined the local rec center with a friend and began swimming a mile three times a week before work.

I think it's all making a difference - perhaps, as Rubin notes in the book, more in the absence of negative emotions than in the greater presence of positive ones. I will be making a big change in the fall, when I leave both my job and my home for the last four years. That decision in itself was motivated by my desire to find happiness, or create it for myself. I know, however, that the process will be stressful. I'll need every inner resource I possess to remain calm, not to sweat the little - or even the big - things, and, as my grandmother would remind me, to emphasize the positive. Hopefully the consciousness I'm working to develop - happiness meditation, perhaps, would be a good descriptor - will grow, and stay with me in the coming months.