Happier at Home

by Gretchen Rubin

  “You’d have to drive every day for several years to take it for granted,” Elizabeth said, “but you’re driving. You’d just better keep it up, or you might stop altogether again.”

  “I look for chances to drive, then I dread it. But it is satisfying to know that I’ve conquered—somewhat—that fear.”

  I never did manage to have a day of unbroken resolutions, but I did better. When Eliza started her guitar lessons, she asked me where to store her guitar. Instead of following my first impulse to tell her to stow it in the back of a little-used closet, I remembered the usefulness of “Convenience” as a prop to self-control, and told her she could keep it in the corner of her bedroom. The more convenient she found it to pick up her guitar, the more she’d play. (A friend suggested that I get her a guitar stand, but that’s exactly the kind of specialized, optional item that an under-buyer like me would never buy.) Improvement was worthwhile even if perfection proved elusive; as Benjamin Franklin observed of his own happiness project, “On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was by the Endeavor a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been, if I had not attempted it.”

  Over the last months, as my home began to reflect my inclinations and tastes more truly, I felt happier there. As the Fifth Splendid Truth holds: I can build a happy life only on the foundation of my own nature. “Just because something is fun for someone else doesn’t make it fun for me—and vice versa,” I repeated. “I can choose what I do, but I can’t choose what I like to do.” Again and again, I realized that to be happy, I must “Be Gretchen.” Empty shelves make some people happy; collections make some people happy. Walking around the neighborhood makes some people happy; walking along the Great Wall of China makes some people happy. What was true for me? A Zen koan holds: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” What did that mean? Mere emulation—even emulation of a spiritual master such as the Buddha—wasn’t the way to happiness. I had to follow what was true for me.

  My home was a reflection of myself, so the work I did to make my home more homey was actually an extended exercise in self-knowledge. To be more at home at home, I had to know myself, and face myself. This was the way to true simplicity: to be myself, free from affectation, posturing, or defensiveness.

  To “Be Gretchen” was the way to happiness, but there was also a sadness to this resolution—the sadness that comes from admitting my limitations, my indifferences, all the things that I wish I were that I will never be. To cram my days full of the things I loved, I had to acknowledge the things that played no part in my happiness. My home would boast no gleaming, well-loved piano, there was no jazz playing in the background, no dog barking by the door, no ski clothes in the closet, no fresh flowers on the hall table … but I have my shrines, the things I treasure. The more I pushed myself to “Be Gretchen,” the more my life changed. It felt simpler but also more rich. As Thomas Merton wrote in his Journal, “Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.”

  And, as I’d hoped, my project to be happier at home had made my family happier, too. The warm greetings, the holiday breakfasts, the good smells, the mountaintop in the cabinet—even the cleaner shelves—contributed to an atmosphere that was more lighthearted and loving, for all of us.

  I worked hard to live up to my quite serious First Personal Commandment to “Be Gretchen”; I also worked on a more whimsical list of Secrets of Adulthood for Home that I’d been compiling over the past nine months. Robert Louis Stevenson remarked, “The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of outward conditions,” but I definitely felt happier when we had extra packs of paper towels on hand.

  • Throw away a pen or magic marker as soon as it runs dry.

  • Every room should include something purple.

  • Almost never accept anything that’s free.

  • Replace a lightbulb or an empty roll of toilet paper right away.

  • A door or a drawer should be easy to close.

  • Although it’s often easier to hang on to something instead of deciding whether and how to get rid of it, get rid of it now.

  • Keep pens, a notepad, and a pair of scissors in every room.

  • Write down anything I need to remember.

  • After reading a magazine, make a rip in the cover to show that I’ve finished with it, and if I haven’t read it after two months, get rid of it.

  • Break a large task into smaller tasks.

  • Keep my phone and my computer charged.

  • Always put my keys away in the same place.

  • Somewhere, keep a stash of cash.

  • Don’t wait to run out of printer paper before buying more.

  • If something’s important to me, I should reserve time for it in my schedule, make a place for it in my home, and build relationships around it.

  • It’s the task that’s never started that’s the most wearisome.

  • If I don’t really want something, getting it won’t make me happy.

  • Someplace, keep an empty shelf; someplace, keep a junk drawer.

  But as the month progressed, as I worked to follow my Secrets of Adulthood for Home, and my Splendid Truths, and my personal commandments, and my many resolutions, I saw more clearly an even deeper truth that underlay them all: Now is now. My final and Eighth Splendid Truth.

  Now is the time to “Be Gretchen,” and to be happier—not once I’ve finished my manuscript, not once I’ve caught up on my email. Elias Canetti observed, “One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.” If there’s not time now to decorate graham cracker houses, or to kiss Jamie good-bye, or to visit the Eleusis panel at the Metropolitan Museum, I must make time.

  One of the persistent follies of human nature is to imagine true happiness is just out of reach. The “arrival fallacy” describes our tendency to believe that once we arrive at a particular destination, then we’ll be happy. People generally expect that the future will be slightly happier than the past; in one study, when asked where they thought they’d be in ten years, 95 percent of people expected their lives would be better in the future than in the past, and people already satisfied with their lives believed they’d be even more satisfied.

  Throughout my life—during college, during my clerkship with Justice O’Connor, during Eleanor’s pre-school years, during my books’ publishing cycles, even at our wedding—I’ve experienced a … skipping, a feeling of jumping from prologue to epilogue without ever feeling that I’m at the center of time. “It’s too soon for that,” “I have plenty of time to get to that,” or “I’m too young to do that,” I’d think, then suddenly, overnight, “It’s too late for that,” “It’s almost over,” or “I’m too old for that.” In Saki’s short story “Reginald at the Carlton,” a character remarks, “Hors d’oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me.… They remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like—and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’oeuvres.” I didn’t want to come to the end of my life and wish I’d paid more attention along the way.

  This winter, I’d made that mistake about the snow. We had a tremendous amount of snow in January and February, but I never paid much attention; I thought there would be more snow, and then I’d take the time fully to revel in it. But after the third big snow, no more snow came. I’d waited too long to build a snowman.

  This skipping feeling was accompanied by a strange sense of make-believe—that the people around me were playing elaborate games of pretend. I’d hear Jamie talk on the phone, and as I heard him say things like, “I can’t believe they’ll expect us to double EBITDA,” “The quarter is going to be a nice surprise, but the question is the trending,” “We sold at about twelve times trailing,” or “I poked around the Data Room this morning, but I did
n’t see anything,” and I’d think admiringly, “He does such a good imitation of a finance guy”—but he is a finance guy. Or my friend would talk about writing a book review, and I’d think, “She sounds just like someone who would write book reviews for the newspaper”—but she is a newspaper book reviewer. My father acts exactly like the grandfather that he is. We’re not playing tea party; this is real.

  In a way, the tea-party feeling was comforting, because it made life less serious; it gave everything a faint air of the ridiculous. But I fought this attitude. I am living my real life, this is it. Now is now, and if I waited to be happier, waited to have fun, waited to do the things that I know I ought to do, I might never get the chance.

  My happiness project was my effort to stop the days from flowing away, unheeded and unappreciated. As I reflected on the changes I’d made in my home over the past year, and how I’d tried to cram my life with the things I loved, I realized, yet again, the truth of that mysterious line from Samuel Johnson: “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.” My home was a reflection of me: It would be serene, festive, loving, and welcoming only if I brought that spirit to it. To feel more at home at home, I must carry my home, my treasure, within me. A happy home wasn’t a place that I could furnish, but an attitude of mind I must develop.

  So, as the month unfolded, I read the manual, I worked on the online donor registry, I planned a nice little surprise (popcorn and a movie on a school night, a thrilling treat for my daughters). I dreaded driving, but I drove. I worked on my photo albums. I paused to smell the clementines. In the two memorandum boxes, I carefully arranged Eliza’s first preemie onesie and her nursery school placemat, and Eleanor’s tiny ballet slippers and her first lost tooth; these treasures I lay up should I ever be lost.

  Then, on one of the last afternoons in May, as I was walking home from the library, I was struck by a realization that had somehow escaped me all year long. “Laura Ingalls Wilder is the best writer about home!” I thought. The subject of house and home gave the very structure to her work! I almost stopped on the sidewalk to think this over.

  Just to hear the words Little House in the Big Woods gave me an overwhelming sense of childhood, of coziness, of the smallness of our lives in the vast forest. Once upon a time, more than a century ago, there stood one little house in the Big Woods, with pumpkins in the attic and a china shepherdess on the mantelpiece—and to the girl who lived there, it was the whole world.

  And I thought once again of a passage that I had read countless times, of the sleepy reflections of five-year-old Laura, on the final page of Little House in the Big Woods.

  When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

  “They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”

  But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

  She thought to herself, “This is now.”

  She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

  As I walked up the steps to my building on that spring afternoon, and looked up at the windows of my little apartment in the big city, I reminded myself, “Now is now.” And I know what the child Laura did not yet know. Now is now, and now is already a long time ago.

  As I turned the key and pushed open the front door, as I crossed the threshold, I thought how breathtaking, how fleeting, how precious was my ordinary day. Now is now. Here is my treasure.

  AFTERWORD

  My resolution to “Embrace good smells” has developed into a full-blown obsession. A few of my favorite perfumes:

  CB I Hate Perfume Demeter Fragrance Library Frédéric Malle

  To See a Flower Fireplace Lys Méditerranée

  Hay Pure Soap En Passant

  Tea/Rose Baby Powder Gardenia de Nuit

  On the Beach 1966

  Memory of Kindness (for the Fleur Mécanique)

  The work on the Eleusinian Mysteries project proceeds steadily, but very slowly—because at this writing, my sister has two pilots in development at two major networks.

  The Happiness Project had a starring moment on the game show Jeopardy! For the category “Glee,” the clues were all synonyms for the word, including “Gretchen Rubin chronicled a year in which she tried to be more gleeful in a blog and a book called this ‘project.’ ” Answer: “Happiness.”

  I became chair of the Public and Professional Education Committee for the New York Organ Donor Network. Work on the organ donor registry continues. Remember to tell your family you wish to be a donor and to sign the registry: www.donatelife.net.

  We now have a secret landscape inside our kitchen cupboard.

  Jamie’s liver continues to hold steady. And he wants to get a dog.

  I still don’t like to drive.

  And now I’m off to live happier ever after.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Although one of the key lessons of my happiness project is the importance of gratitude, I can’t thank everyone who contributed to my project, because practically everyone I know has given me some insight into happiness. Certain people, however, deserve special recognition for their contribution to Happier at Home.

  First, I want to thank my brilliant agent, Christy Fletcher—for her insightful criticism, her unerring judgment, her enthusiasm for creative experiment, her insatiable desire for information, and her deep knowledge of how to harness my writerly tics and neuroses. And thanks to the rest of the team at Fletcher & Company: Alyssa Wolff, Melissa Chinchillo, and Mink Choi.

  Special thanks, too, to everyone at Crown. In particular, Sydny Miner, my terrific editor, and Tina Constable, publisher extraordinaire, and Meredith McGinnis, Tammy Blake, Maya Mavjee, and Michael Palgon, and my Canadian publisher, Kristin Cochrane.

  And for all their help during the writing of the book, Ashley Wilson and Freda Richardson, of course and always. Sarah Scully told me about the Attila School of Driving and inspired me, by her example, to tackle my fear of driving. Jacqueline Schmidt of Screech Owl Design put a mountaintop in our kitchen cabinet. Thanks to everyone with whom I work on the issue of organ donation: the New York Organ Donor Network, particularly Helen Irving, James Pardes, Julia Rivera, Dr. Sander Florman, Sally Rogers, Peter Hutchings, and especially Elaine Berg, and Bradley Tusk and Caitlin LaCroix of Tusk Strategies, and John Cordo. And, as always, a special thanks to the extraordinary Dr. Leona Kim.

  A heartfelt thanks to the readers who commented on evolving drafts of Happier at Home: Elizabeth Craft Fierro, Jack Craft and Karen Craft, Kim Malone Scott, Reed Hundt, Helen Coster, Jennifer Joel, Michael Melcher, Rebecca Gradinger—and, most of all, Laureen Rowland.

  I’m extremely lucky to work with terrific people on various offshoots of Happier at Home and The Happiness Project. The incomparable Jayme Johnson. The team at Apartment One: Liza Lowinger, Spencer Bagley, and Raima McDaniel. Tom Romer and the folks at the Chopping Block. The fabulous Rosemary Ellis, Veronica Chambers, and the team at Good Housekeeping. Maria Giacchino of My Little Jacket, and Alexander Mallis. Howie Sanders and Leslie Schuster of UTA.

  Thanks to all my friends, who not only make me very happy but also have supplied many insights, examples, and adventures. The members of my book group, my kidlit book groups, the Invisible Institute, MGM, and other groups have given me innumerable ideas and terrific support. A huge thanks, too, to all my friends and colleagues in blogland—they’re a huge source of happiness for me, every day. In particular, I can’t say enough to thank the readers of the Happiness Project blog, with special thanks to those whose words I quote here. The ability to engage with t
houghtful readers on the issue of happiness has added immeasurably to my understanding and enthusiasm for the subject.

  Finally, as always, I want to thank my family for their love, their forbearance, and their suggestions as I worked on this book. You are my home.

  YOUR HAPPINESS PROJECT

  Each person’s happiness project will be unique, but it’s the rare person who can’t benefit from starting one. My happiness project stretched from September through May—and, I expect, will continue for the rest of my life—but your happiness project can start anytime and last as long as you choose.

  To decide what resolutions to undertake, consider the First Splendid Truth:

  1. What makes you feel good? What activities do you find fun, satisfying, or energizing?

  2. What makes you feel bad? What are sources of anger, irritation, boredom, frustration, or anxiety in your life?

  3. Is there any way in which you don’t feel right about your life? Do you wish you could change your job, city, family situation, or other circumstances? Are you living up to your expectations for yourself? Does your life reflect your values?

  4. Do you have sources of an atmosphere of growth? In what elements of your life do you find progress, learning, challenge, improvement, and increased mastery?

  Once you’ve decided what areas need work, identify specific, measurable resolutions that will allow you to evaluate whether you’re making progress. Resolutions work better when they’re concrete: It’s harder to keep a resolution to “Be a more loving parent” than to “Get up fifteen minutes early so I’m dressed before the kids wake up.”

  Another useful exercise is to identify your personal commandments—the principles that you want to guide your behavior. For example, my most important personal commandment is to “Be Gretchen.”