Happier at Home

by Gretchen Rubin

  “I’ve been intrigued by this subject my whole life—the Eleusinian Mysteries, a secret initiation rite celebrated in ancient Greece. It was celebrated for two thousand years, and no one ever told the secret of the mysteries.”

  “What were the secrets?”

  “No one knows! Eleusis was one of the holiest places in Greece, and the Eleusinian Mysteries—sacred rites in honor of Demeter and Persephone—drew participants from all over the ancient world. Everyone: men, women, slaves, emperors, poets, philosophers. It was a nine-day initiation, and it culminated in the revelation of a great secret. But here’s the thing: Despite the fact that so many people participated, for so many hundreds of years, its secrets were never betrayed. We only know scraps. Hints like, whatever happened involved ‘things recited, things shown, and things performed.’ ”

  “That sounds pretty interesting,” Dan said. “I’ll check it out.”

  The next day, I sent Dan the link to the Wikipedia entry. A few days later, I heard back from him.

  FROM: Ehrenhaft, Daniel

  TO: Gretchen Rubin

  I just read about the Eleusinian Mysteries.

  Honestly: This could be the natural YA paranormal/romance successor for all the kids (girls and boys) who grew up on Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. It could be a romantic YA thriller partially in the vein of the Da Vinci Code, but also alternating between past and present—involving a secret, romantic, dangerous, and magic world that’s existed for thousands of years without our knowing.

  If you’re game, I’d love to talk to you about this sooner rather than later.

  Your overly excited friend,

  Dan

  Before answering, I emailed my sister:

  FROM: Gretchen Rubin

  TO: Liz Craft

  I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the Greek religion lately (?) and am very intrigued with the Eleusinian Mysteries. 2000 years, no one has ever known the secret! NOTHING! No one broke the secret!

  I mentioned this to Dan E when I saw him Tues night (our annual tri-kidlit party) and sent him the link, because I thought it would make a great basis for a YA series. Enough history is known to make it seem “real” and rooted in actual reality, but huge scope for imagination (as Anne of Green Gables would say). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries

  Apparently he agrees! I don’t have the chops to write this, but YOU DO!!!! Any interest? I do think it is a very rich idea. The Wikipedia entry doesn’t do justice to the crazy Eleusis stuff (e.g., the name of the town Eleusis means “arrival”—how thrilling is that?).

  Any interest? I would LOVE to see what you would do with this!!!

  Elizabeth called me. “I’m in!”

  “Really? You really want to try to do something with this idea?”

  “Absolutely. Let’s work on it together.”

  I was thrilled. A way to collaborate with Elizabeth! On such a fascinating subject!

  Then the work began. Dan started the process by sending out a few pages that sketched out the bones of a story, and slowly, we began to elaborate on the characters and the plot. While most novels are written by a single author, many other models exist as well.

  At the end of one of our conversations, I said, “I’m so excited about this. I have to read a quotation, to evoke that Eleusinian mood.” (I love quotations.)

  “Let’s hear it!” Elizabeth and Dan said together.

  I cleared my voice dramatically. “It’s from Seneca. ‘There are holy things that are not communicated all at once: Eleusis always keeps something back to show those who come again.’ ” It still gives me a chill, every time I read it.

  Over the next several months, we built on the story; sometimes the three of us, sometimes just Elizabeth and me. Was the story from a first-person perspective, or third-person? What exactly was happening in the part of the story set in ancient Greece, and when? As we worked, certain elements began to become clearer. In the contemporary story, the family runs one of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas. In ancient Greece, a central character was born a slave.

  Elizabeth was doing the hardest work—actually writing those first chapters—but I had a role to play, too. I could edit and help brainstorm, and I love research. While Elizabeth worked on the difficult issues of character and plot, I dug into the history and mythology of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

  At one point, I admit, I lost heart. We’ve all said those familiar words: “If I’d known how much work would be involved, I’m not sure I would’ve started.” Often when I have an idea for a creative undertaking, it seems straightforward and fun, but as I dig deeper, I realize how much time, energy, and effort will be required to carry through. It’s hard to do even simple things well, and most things aren’t simple. As it became clear how much work Eleusis (or whatever we would call it—another critical question) would demand, even from me, I felt overwhelmed.

  I would be doing just one small part, but was even that contribution too great a responsibility and distraction? Maybe I should drop out and focus my energies on my own work. I was so busy; I already had too much to do. Keep it simple.

  No! Bigger. I have plenty of time to do the things that are important to me. Pouring out ideas is better for creativity than doling them out by the teaspoon. Instead of brooding about the gigantic amount of work needed to complete the entire project, I thought about the work needed to be finished, by me, this month. That seemed manageable.

  And I loved working with my sister. We’d call each other and abruptly launch into shorthand talk that drew on themes and techniques from other books or movies we loved.

  “Not to keep bringing it up, but again, she’s like Michael in The Godfather.”

  “Have you read The Passage yet?”

  “I’ve got to reread The Magus.”

  “The thing is, pomegranates are really associated with Persephone. Demeter is all about the grain.”

  “The Secret History. The source of the power.”

  “Stay with me here, but what about a kind of Sound of Music escape?”

  “Listen to this, from Carl Jung: ‘There is no better means of intensifying the treasured feeling of individuality than the possession of a secret which the individual is pledged to guard. The very beginnings of societal structures reveal the craving for secret organizations. When no valid secrets really exist, mysteries are invented or contrived to which privileged initiates are admitted.’ Right?”

  After reading Carl Kerényi’s Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, I sent an email:

  FROM: Gretchen Rubin

  TO: Daniel Ehrenhaft, Liz Craft

  SUBJECT: Re: I have just one word for you …

  Pigs. Mystical pigs.

  “So what’s the deal with the pigs?” Elizabeth asked, the next time we spoke.

  “Pigs are very important!” was all I would say. “Mystical pigs. Just wait. I’m pulling together some information for you.”

  Soon I’d gathered a tall stack of books from which to pull the rich details that could feed a novelist’s imagination. Mystery Cults of the Ancient World. A History of Religious Ideas, volumes one and two. Homo Necans (“Man the Killer”—I especially loved that book). The Complete World of Greek Mythology. The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts. Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. I pulled together a packet of some of the most helpful material and mailed it out, and I also sent Elizabeth some books of the Everyday Life in Ancient Greece type, to help her anchor her story in history.

  Not long after that, one exciting day, an email from Elizabeth popped up in my in-box.

  FROM: Liz Craft

  TO: Gretchen Rubin

  SUBJECT: a few pages

  Hey—Here are a few pages. Really only the first 3 of the book proper. (There are a couple title pages for ego-boosting padding …) But this was a complete scene so I figured it was good to send. Next scene will be them going to the vault. BE BRUTAL! I have a VERY thick skin. Nothing you can say will both
er me. I just want to get it right, which is why I’m sending now. Just give me your gut reaction. Don’t worry about Line-edits. Thanks!

  It was thrilling to see the page with the words Eleusis: The Unspeakable Act (as we were currently calling it) slide out from my printer. Elizabeth had started to spin a real story, and I saw how good it would be. There was an immense distance to cover, but the long labor was well begun at last. Not long after, I got another email from Elizabeth, who was spending a family weekend in Las Vegas:

  FROM: Liz Craft

  TO: Gretchen Rubin

  Grain decorations at the casino restaurant … A sign.

  Demeter. She’s all about the grain.

  “The thing is, I’m not going to be able to work very fast,” she reminded me. “I have my day job, too.”

  “We’re not in any rush,” I answered. “It’s a Secret of Adulthood: People tend to overestimate what can be done in the short term, and underestimate what can be done in the long term, a little bit each day. Let’s keep it fun!”

  But then I thought of my irritating, if well-intended, whip-cracking tendencies. “Do you want me to bug you about it?” I asked. “I can be a bit relentless. But if you want me to badger you a little, I will.”

  “I do want accountability. Let’s plan that I’ll email you with new material each week. You can remind me.”

  “I promise not to nag,” I said (a promise more to myself than to her).

  And so the project started in earnest. It was hard to know exactly how it would proceed, but it had begun.

  As the First Splendid Truth makes clear, the feeling of growth and movement toward a goal is very important to happiness—just as important, and perhaps more important, than finally reaching that goal. Nietzsche captured this tension: “The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.” While some more passive forms of leisure, such as watching TV or surfing the Internet, are fun in the short term, over time, they don’t offer nearly the same happiness as more challenging activities—such as becoming an expert on the Eleusinian Mysteries or editing the draft of a chapter.

  I was extremely lucky. It was my job to learn and to write, and I had tremendous freedom, every day, to decide what to do and how to do it. Yet even for me, the more room I found in my life for choosing projects that I truly loved, and working toward them, the happier I became.

  I’d expected to enjoy collaborating with my sister, and I certainly did, but I also found that just talking to her more often made a big difference. Now that we had a particular reason to call, we talked more, and, no surprise, I felt closer to her. We were so interested in the project that we barely took the time to talk about anything else, and I wasn’t up to date on the plans for her kitchen renovation or on her latest meetings with studio executives, and we talked only a short time about Jack’s latest cute exploits, but it didn’t matter.

  “It’s really terrific, the way it worked out for you to work with Elizabeth,” commented a friend who knows us both. “And how crazy that your kidlit groups turned into a professional opportunity, and with her! It’s almost too good to be true.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. It did seem almost … magical. How had I been so lucky, for everything to work out so neatly?

  As I thought back, I realized the secret: “Be Gretchen.” As part of my first happiness project, in an effort to embrace my true nature and my real passions, I’d started my kidlit group. Without that decision, I wouldn’t have had a reason to see Dan, I wouldn’t have been thinking so much about children’s literature, I wouldn’t have seen the creative possibilities in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with Elizabeth. How appropriate, for someone now obsessed with the religion of ancient Greece, that the admonition to “Know Thyself” is inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Be Gretchen.

  At the end of March, we went on our annual spring-break beach trip with my in-laws.

  “Are you dreading it, having to go on vacation with your in-laws?” a friend asked before we left.

  “No,” I answered, surprised. “It’s great. Especially with the girls.” My mother-in-law loves to build sandcastles, look for shells, read aloud, reenact Swan Lake in the swimming pool, and generally “mess around,” as she calls it, with Eliza and Eleanor. My father-in-law doesn’t actually build sandcastles, but he enjoys hanging around the action. That means that along with family time, Jamie and I also get a chance to go to the gym, take a nap, or do a little work if we want. Fun for the whole family.

  “You’ve been on a trip with them before?”

  “Oh, sure. We go on a trip with Jamie’s parents every spring break, and take another little trip with them over Labor Day weekend. And we visit my parents for a week at Christmas and a week in August.”

  “I can’t even imagine that,” she said with a shudder. “For me, that kind of intense family time would be hell.”

  This conversation reminded me, again, how fortunate I was. Just as I shouldn’t take my family’s good health for granted, I shouldn’t take the harmony (mostly) of our relationships for granted.

  While on vacation, I used myself as a guinea pig to test the conclusion of some interesting studies. According to this research, interrupting a pleasant experience with something less pleasant can intensify a person’s overall pleasure; for example, surprisingly, commercials make TV watching more fun, and interrupting a massage heightens the pleasure it gives.

  For my own version of the experiment, along with my vacation pleasure reading, I brought several long articles. They’d been sitting on my shelf, cluttering up my precious surface space and weighing on my mind, for months. If I sat down with them, I could probably read the entire stack in a few hours, but I’d never managed to make myself do that.

  I brought the papers on vacation, and every day, I read one. And, as the studies predicted, this small, daily irksome task made vacation more fun. Having a little chore amplified my general feeling of leisure; when I was reading for fun, it felt more fun. Also, tackling this work made me feel virtuous and productive, and gave me a sense of accomplishment that far outweighed the actual work I was doing. (Gold stars!)

  This year, the last day of our trip fell on April Fool’s Day, which meant an opportunity to celebrate a variation of a holiday breakfast. Because we weren’t at home, I had to come up with a plan that didn’t involve my standby prank prop: food coloring.

  I walked into the girls’ room as they were waking up. “Listen, guys, I have something to tell you,” I said in a serious voice. “The hotel just dropped off an important note.” I held up an envelope that I’d retrieved from the trash to lend some credibility to my announcement. “They’ve discovered something in the water that might not be healthy, so no one is supposed to go swimming today.”

  “At the beach or in the pool?” asked Eliza.

  “Well, neither. They think people might be able to use the pool tomorrow, but we’ll be gone. I’m really sorry about this.”

  Eliza suddenly got a suspicious look on her face. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “Look at the letter!” I said, handing it to her.

  “What’s in the water?” Eleanor asked in a mournful voice.

  “Some kind of bacteria.”

  “Wow, this is terrible,” said Eliza, pretending to read the letter. I couldn’t believe it. Eliza was playing along with me! “What a drag, we can’t swim all day.”

  “That’s okay, Mommy,” said Eleanor bravely. “We can do other things.”

  Protests, I could stand, but not that downcast little face. I couldn’t keep up the joke. “April Fool’s!” I yelled.

  “Really?” said Eleanor. “It’s just a joke? We can swim?”

  “I really believed you at first!” said Eliza.

  “It was a real April Fool’s trick?” asked Eleanor. “I want to go tell Grandma and Grandpa!”

  I had them do a reenactm
ent so I could take a photo.

  We had a wonderful time on the trip, with a minimum of whining or complaining, from children or adults. On the way home, I listed the Secrets of Adulthood that came in handy during a family vacation:

  Less is more.

  Start early if possible.

  When packing an item that might leak, put it in a plastic bag.

  Don’t let anyone get too hungry. Especially me.

  Cheerfulness is contagious, and crabbiness is even more contagious.

  Wear sunscreen.

  Carry tissues.

  Remind kids to visit the bathroom—don’t wait for the thought to occur to them.

  Get plenty of sleep.

  There’s joy in routine, but an occasional disruption makes routine all the sweeter.

  Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong.

  Quit while you’re ahead.

  Make each of my children helpless with laughter at least once each day.

  Doing a little work makes goofing off more fun.

  The things that go wrong often make the best memories.

  If possible, return on Saturday for a day at home before the regular routine starts.

  Leave plenty of room in the suitcase.

  As Eisenhower observed, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

  The point is to have fun.

  Back in New York City, as we dragged our suitcases off the service elevator, I thought, once again, of one of the simplest and most obvious Secrets of Adulthood: There’s no place like home.

  The first day that I was back at my desk after vacation, I spoke on the phone with a reporter who was writing a piece about happiness. One minute into the conversation, I could tell he came from the happiness-is-overrated-selfish-and-probably-illusory camp, or perhaps from the people-would-be-more-authentically-fulfilled-if-they-weren’t-brainwashed-into-pursuing-the-smiley-face-of-happiness camp. And a happiness leech, certainly. In an accusatory tone, he said, “Well, of course, you think people should be blissfully happy every minute of every day.”