Happiness Project

With some help, I have set three goals for myself. Things that both of us think will help to improve me and my relationships. The goals are to work on my communication skills, organize my house, and read some books that might help me to find out who I am and who I want to be.

Not to long ago I found the blog of Gretchen Rubin about her Happiness Project. Since then I have been interested to read her book and see what I think about it. I bought the book for my Kindle shortly after, but didn't really take the time to look at it. It was a book I wanted to get to, but it was never top on my list. It needed to be moved there though. And now it is.

Her main reason for starting her happiness project was not that she wasn't happy to begin with. She says, "I had everything I could possible want--yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had. I didn't want to keep taking these days for granted. The words of the writer Colette had haunted me for years: 'What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.' I didn't want to look back, at the end of my life or after some great catastrophe, and thing, "How happy I used to be then, if only I'd realized it."

This really struck me. I have a really good life. I have friends and family who love me. Instead of being thankful for them and being thankful that they are in my life, I question and wonder why they love me. What I really have to offer them and when am I going to do something that will make them stop. It isn't all happiness and roses here. We do have our struggles, some relationships more than others, but I love my friends and family. Sometimes the struggles make the learning, growing, and loving happen even more.

Gretchen says, "I grasped two things: I wasn't as happy as I could be, and my life wasn't going to change unless I made it change."

Exactly!! I get stuck in my little ruts and my little bouts of self-pity and don't allow myself to recognize all of the things that I have to be thankful for. That is not fair to those that I love.

Gretchen did a lot of reading, and when I say a lot, I mean a lot. She did a lot of research on what she could do to improve her level of happiness or at least her recognition of her happiness. Heaven knows I have not done nearly that amount of research, but I can benefit at least a little bit from her research. Her reading showed her that she had to answer two crucial questions.

1. Do I believe it is possible to make myself happier?
2. What it happiness?

Happiness is different things to different people. Yeah, we could go to a dictionary and get the actual definition, but what makes one person happy doesn't necessarily make the next person happy.

Gretchen also made sure that it was clear that to opposite of happiness is unhappiness, not depression. Depression is serious and its causes and remedies were far beyond the scope of her happiness project.

To complete the happiness project, Gretchen set twelve resolutions, one to focus on each month of the year. Within these resolutions she set definable and trackable goals to accomplish them. She also set her twelve commandments and her Secrets of Adulthood that would help her to accomplish her resolutions.

It sounds like a very interesting project. Something that I could most likely benefit from. I am going to do some thinking and some working on things and see if I can come up with resolutions, commandments, and secrets that I can use to complete my own happiness project. We will see how it goes.

What I can say at this point is that I wish I had not purchased this on the Kindle, but in an actual book format. There aren't many books that I would want to mark up or put notes in, but I think this one would be one of those.