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My First Splendid Truth is: To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. Although this sounds like a simple and rather obvious formula, it took me a huge amount of time and thinking to work it out.
Even once I’d come up with it, however, I didn’t understand the true importance of the fourth element, the atmosphere of growth. But the more I think about the elements of a happy life, the more convinced I’ve become of its importance.
How do you cultivate an atmosphere of growth? You can fix something broken; clean something up; help someone who’s in trouble; make something; help someone move forward; learn something new; start something; plan and execute something. Having a place in your life where you are “growing” will make you feel much happier – plus these kinds of activities tend to foster other happiness-boosting actions, like spending time with people, making new friends, anticipating something fun, trying something new and challenging, etc.
One of my favorite ways to “grow” is to read something that changes the way I view the world. Suddenly, everything comes into focus more clearly, and my understanding deepens.
I felt this way when I read McCloud’s Understanding Comics, Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Bataille’s The Accursed Share: Consumption (I thought my head would explode when I read that, still have never been able to re-read it), Woolf's The Waves, Canetti’s Crowds and Power, Koestenbaum’s Jackie Under My Skin…
I have a special fondness for analysis that’s heavy on lists, categories, and schemes. That’s how I think myself – whether about power, money, fame and sex, or the life of Winston Churchill, or a happiness project, I always impose a very strict explicit order on my subject.
I’m enjoying this experience of intellectual revelation right now, because I’m halfway through the extraordinary book, Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order: Book One: The Phenomenon of Life. I already had this experience reading Alexander before, because I still haven’t recovered from the ecstasy of reading A Pattern Language. I’m slowly working my way through everything Alexander wrote, and The Nature of Order is not disappointing me.
In a nutshell, Alexander is outlining the qualities that give “life” to design – in the man-made world and in the natural world. Since I began this book, I find myself looking at buildings, fabrics, shells, everything, in a new way. One of the great, fundamental interests of my life is the relationship between people and objects (why, I have no idea, but this subject fascinates me) – plus I have an obsession that I call “symbols beyond words” which incorporates some of Alexander’s ideas.
Alexander identifies “fifteen structural [and also, he argues, objective] features which appear again and again in things which do have life”:
1. levels of scale
2. strong centers
3. boundaries
4. alternating repetition
5. positive space
6. good shape
7. local symmetries
8. deep interlock and ambiguity
9. contrast
10. gradients
11. roughness
12. echoes
13. the void
14. simplicity and inner calm
15. non-separateness
Considering his arguments is giving me tremendous intellectual pleasure -- in particular, because I’m not a visually oriented person, they're giving me a very satisfying tool for looking at the world and understanding what I find pleasing. (Though I have to admit, I just don’t appreciate a good Turkish carpet design the way Alexander does.)
The atmosphere of growth can be particularly useful to consider when you’re feeling unhappy, because it’s an area that’s directly under your control, right away. You can do something now to create an atmosphere of growth.
True, when you're feeling blue, it can be tough to push yourself to learn something new, or get something started, or whatever. So start small. Search for an area where you can foster a bit of growth.
* I always find a lot of interesting, and funny, material on RealDelia -- "finding yourself in adulthood."
* Volunteer as a Super-Fan, and from time to time, I'll ask for your help. Nothing onerous, I promise! But a big help to me.
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I’m a huge fan of book groups, and I’m in three, myself. In two of my book groups, we read children’s literature—the first group got so large that we had to close it, so I started another one. I’m also in a group in which we read adult fiction or nonfiction. I think joining or starting a group is an excellent engine of happiness, and a book group is one of the most popular organizing principles for a group.
If I do say so myself, I think The Happiness Project would make a good choice for book groups. There’s a lot to talk about, whether or not you agree with my approach; in fact, if you disagree with my approach, you have even more to talk about.
If you’re in a book group and think that you’d encourage your group to choose The Happiness Project, I’d love to hear from you. You can’t know for sure, of course, until you actually see the book, and reading the book is very different from reading the blog, but if you’re a blog reader who wants to suggest the book for your book group, please drop me a note.
Why? I’m working on a reading-group guide, and I want to be able to send it to you. Also, I'll give away a certain number of free early copies of the book, when it’s ready, and I’ll choose randomly from these e-mails to send out what supplies I get.
This is on the honor system. If you're a member of a book group, and you sincerely believe you might be inclined to recommend the book to your group ...
- E-mail me at gretchenrubin1 [at] gmail.com (don't forget the "1") with the message "book group."
- Include your name and address if you'd like to be eligible for a free book.
- If you're willing, I'd love to get a brief description of your group: how many members, what kind of books you read, etc. No particular reason, I'm just curious about book groups.
I feel a little sheepish about this post, because I don't want to seem to be doing too much self-promotion, but—there it is!
* Yes, Delia is a good friend of mine, but I'd read her blog RealDelia—"finding yourself in adulthood"—even if I didn't know her.
* If you're interested in starting your own happiness project, check out the Happiness Project Toolbox. Lots of great tools there—plus, you can see what other people are doing, which is addictive.
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“In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried … nothing is so warming and companionable.”—Elizabeth Goudge
It's one of my Secrets of Adulthood: the best reading is rereading.
* I send out short monthly newsletters that highlight the best of the previous month’s posts to about 23,000 subscribers. If you’d like to sign up, click here or e-mail me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. (sorry about that weird format—trying to to thwart spammers.) Just write “newsletter” in the subject line. It’s free.