Happier at Home Page 13
Me: “Maybe it’s not so bad.”
Mom: “Oh, it is that bad.”
It’s so frustrating!
I purposely try to be a Tigger as much as possible, and when life is going well, I am flying on the clouds. However, my girlfriend is happy and optimistic sometimes but usually sad, depressed, and realistic about everything wrong (we’re in college, so classes and money tend to be the main things). If I come home and she’s depressed, I try to be more bubbly and happy and try to get her to be active, rather than sitting on the couch and playing computer games. I always thought this would help, but it usually exhausts me and brings me down, without doing much for her. From now on, I will calm down and continue on my way and let her come out of it on her own.
I have a Tigger-type friend. She is incessantly upbeat. To the point that I avoid her at times. But then, after reading what you said here, I remember that her husband is fakely cheerful, but underneath, very pessimistic and negative, remote and cold even. Maybe she’s being so cheerful to counteract him. Since I rarely see her without him around, maybe I don’t get a chance to see a more balanced person?
As I saw the Tigger/Eeyore phenomenon more clearly, my already strong urge to be a happiness bully became almost irresistible. I had to bite my tongue not to give little helpful lectures:
“Hey, Tigger! Remember the Seventh Splendid Truth: You can’t make someone be happy. Let your happiness naturally rub off on the Eeyores, but don’t exhaust yourself trying to jolly them along. Telling Eeyores to ‘Cheer up!’ doesn’t make them happier; it drives them nuts.”
“Hey, Eeyore! Remember, you think you’re being ‘realistic’ and ‘honest,’ but others may find you gloomy and critical, and if being around you is a downer, they’ll want to avoid you—whether or not this should be true, it is true. And while you think some Tiggers are ‘fake,’ their extreme cheerfulness may be in reaction to you—yes, you may be inciting the very Tiggerness that’s making you crazy!”
As I resisted the urge to scold the Tiggers and Eeyores I encountered, I recalled Thoreau’s admonition: “Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.”
“Be Gretchen”—that was work enough.
January
TIME
Cram My Day with What I Love
One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.
—Elias Canetti, The Human Province
- Control the cubicle in my pocket
- Guard my children’s free time
- Suffer for fifteen minutes
- Go on monthly adventures with Jamie
In September, the start of the school year had inspired me to start a happiness project, and now in January, the new calendar year gave me a fresh burst of resolution-keeping zeal. But along with keeping my monthly resolutions, I wanted to experiment with an additional strategy: to choose a single word or phrase as an overarching theme for the entire year. I lifted the idea from my sister, Elizabeth—one year her theme was “Free Time,” another year was “Hot Wheels,” which was the year she bought a car and started driving. A friend does the same thing. One year, he chose “Dark,” one year, “Fame.”
I knew exactly which word to choose as my theme for the year: Bigger. As I fought the urge to simplify, to keep things small and manageable, “Bigger” would challenge me to think big, to tolerate complications and failure, to expect more from myself. I wanted to choose the bigger life.
When I posted on my blog about my one-word theme, readers added their own thought-provoking choices. Renewal. Habit. Play. Healthy. Action. Possibility. Believe. Move. Enough. Details. Serve. Generous. Upgrade. Boundaries. Love. Finish. Answers. Adventure. Forbearance. Create. Dive. Reach. Open. Slower. Flair. As I scrolled through the responses, I noticed that Elizabeth had posted on my blog—I always got a big kick out of seeing her name in the comments—and she chose “Smaller”! The opposite of a profound truth is also true.
Bigger was my theme for the new year.
And back within the familiar, monthly frame of my happiness project for January, as I faced the fresh unbroken snow of the new year, I wanted to think about time. A feeling of control is a very important aspect of happiness. People who feel in control of their lives, which is powerfully bolstered by feeling in control of time, are more likely to feel happy.
I’d loved the unhurriedness of Kansas City. Our days were full of activities, but without any sense of urgency. I didn’t have to race around doing ten things at once; I didn’t have to press the girls (or myself) to finish their breakfasts or to put on their coats in a rush; I set my own pace; I actually completed whatever I set out to do on a particular day.
In January, I wanted to cultivate this atmosphere of unhurriedness at home. I wanted plenty of time to get to where I needed to go, to do the things that I wanted to do, with little time wasted on unsatisfying activities. “I love a broad margin to my life,” wrote Thoreau, and that’s what I wanted to build. Below the energetic bustle on the surface of our lives, I wanted to cultivate an abiding sense of repose.
This wasn’t easy for me; I was always trying to blast through my to-do items. For instance, on mornings when he went to work on the later side, Jamie would sometimes come into Eleanor’s room as I was prodding her to get dressed and announce, “Okay, Eno, I’m leaving for work now. Come give me a kiss.” This was hilarious to Eleanor—because he would be wearing nothing but his boxer shorts! Or he would be dressed in his suit, but with bare feet. I got annoyed with this familiar exchange, because it interrupted our march through the morning checklist, until I finally realized that we have plenty of time to get to school, and it’s nice to start the day with some goofiness. I stopped trying to hustle them along.
Many aspects of my life contributed to my feeling of hurry. Time might seem to be a very separate issue from possessions, for example, but I’d noticed that after I tackled clutter, not only did our apartment seem more spacious and organized, I also felt less hurried, because I could find and stow things easily. Having more order in my cabinets and closets made me feel as though I had more time in my day. Instead of scrabbling away at high shelves in search of a flashlight, or jamming the heating pad into some odd corner, I had a place for everything, with nothing superfluous in my way, which gave me a feeling of unhurriedness and mastery of the space around me.
I often felt as if I were jumping—or being dragged—from one task to another. Various devices rang, buzzed, or chimed in my direction, and while technology often interrupted me, those rackety devices weren’t the only things clamoring for my attention. Of everything, the disruption I found most harassing? When my daughters both talked to me at the same time.
When I felt hurried and distracted, I behaved worse. I nagged Jamie and my daughters more, because I wanted to cross things off my list. I became too preoccupied to notice the ordinary pleasures of my day: the colors of the fruit outside Likitsakos Market around the corner from my apartment; the nice smell outside the florist’s shop; Eliza’s funny stories about what happened in the lunchroom. I spoke more harshly because I was impatient. I was more likely to be rude to people on the street or in stores—which, it turns out, is true of most people. Psychologist Robert Levine calculated the “pace of life” in many American cities by considering factors such as walking speed, bank teller speed, and speed of speech, and he found that the more hurried the pace of life, the less helpful people were apt to be: They were less likely to perform courtesies such as returning a pen that a researcher “accidentally” dropped or giving change for a quarter. New York City ranked as the third fastest city (after Boston and Buffalo) and the least helpful. But as rushed as I felt, I could take the time for courtesy.
Feeling hurried came in at least three flavors for me: treadmill hurry, to-do-list hurry, and put-out-the-fires hurry. With treadmill hurry, I felt that I couldn’t turn myself off for fear I’d never catch up: I couldn’t stop checking my email over the weekend or take a week’s
vacation from writing. With to-do-list hurry, I felt I had to race around and accomplish too many things in too little time. With put-out-the-fires hurry, I felt that I was spending all my time dealing with urgent things, instead of doing the things most important to me.
I didn’t want to slow down but, rather, to change the experience of the pace of my life. “Speed is not part of the true Way of strategy,” legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi observed in A Book of Five Rings. “Speed implies that things seem fast or slow.… Of course, slowness is bad. Really skillful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy.” I wanted a pace of life that was deliberate—that felt neither fast nor slow.
Instead, time seemed to be passing so quickly. Where had autumn gone? New York City was getting record amounts of snow, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that winter hadn’t really started. My sixth-grade year seemed to last forever, yet the first semester of Eliza’s sixth-grade year had passed in a flash.
I’m not the only one to feel this effect; as we get older, time seems to pass more quickly. As poet Robert Southey explained: “Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.” Research supports Southey’s observation. According to work done in the 1970s by Robert Lemlich, people who live to be eighty years old have passed through 71 percent of the subjective experience of the passage of time by the time they’re forty; the years between ages sixty and eighty feel like just 13 percent of life.
Also, I suffered from the persistent delusion that once I got through the next three or four months, things would slow down. “I’ll have more time during the holidays—or after the holidays—or once the summer’s here,” I’d promised myself, over and over. But things never slowed down. If I wanted a feeling of unhurriedness, I would have to create it now.
In January, I wanted to lengthen time, to make it more rich and vivid. But how? When an experience is new or challenging, and we must absorb more information, time seems to pass more slowly; when one day blurs indistinguishably from the last, the months evaporate. So I could slow time by making a radical change in my life: move to a new city or, even better, a new country, or switch careers, or have a baby. But I didn’t want to make a radical change. I’d have to find other ways.
This month I also wanted to make sure that my time reflected my values. Too often, I reacted to other people and circumstances instead of setting my own priorities. (Elizabeth often quoted the line “Your lack of planning is not my emergency.”)
“The thing is,” a friend said, “I don’t have any free time. I need to spend time with my kids, and I have things to get done at home. But I’m at work all day, and I bring work home. There’s just not enough time!”
“I know,” I said, nodding. “Sometimes I’m so overwhelmed with all the things I can’t possibly accomplish that I get paralyzed, and end up leafing through some magazine I’ve already read, because I can’t figure out where to start.”
“So what’s the solution?” she asked. “I can’t do all the things I want to do. I just don’t have enough time.”
I’d often said similar things to myself—but no more. For January, I decided to stop making the excuse “I don’t have time to do that.” I do have time, if I make time for the things that are important to me.
Among my most fundamental uses of time: sleep and exercise. If I want to feel cheerful, energetic, and mentally sharp, I have to get enough sleep—even if that means leaving emails unread or putting down a book in mid-chapter. Sleep deprivation affects the memory, causes irritability, depresses the immune system, and may even contribute to weight gain, and a couple’s sleep quality affects the quality of their relationship. Although chronically sleep-deprived people believe they’re functioning fine, their mental acuity is actually quite impaired, and while many people claim they need only five or six hours of sleep, just 1 to 3 percent of the population thrives on so little sleep. These true “short sleepers” stay up late and get up very early, and they don’t rely on naps, caffeine, or weekend sleep binges. (I have no illusions of being a short sleeper; I’m definitely a long sleeper.) Similarly, exercise is terrifically important for good health, plus I knew that I felt happier—at once more calm and more energetic—when I went to the gym regularly. Also, living in New York City, I do a fair amount of walking in my average day (I clock a mile just making the round-trip walk to the girls’ school). I never push myself to exercise hard, but just to exercise at all. Many years ago, my father, a dedicated exerciser, helped convert me from my previous couch-potato ways by reassuring me, “All you have to do is put on your running shoes and shut the front door behind you.” Whatever new resolutions I might make for the month, sleep and exercise would remain unshakable priorities.
For January’s resolutions, first, I vowed to “Control the cubicle in my pocket,” to gain better control of my time. Also, as a parent, I had great influence not only over my own use of time but also my children’s time, and after a lengthy internal debate, I stuck to a different time-related resolution, to “Guard my children’s free time.” Because I knew I’d be happier if I made time to tackle the chores I dreaded, I vowed to “Suffer for fifteen minutes” each day on a long-postponed task; this would be an unenjoyable resolution, but after all, happiness doesn’t always make me feel happy. At the same time, I wanted to find more time to have fun with Jamie, so I’d ask him to “Go on monthly adventures” together.
CONTROL THE CUBICLE IN MY POCKET
Managing time is a pervasive, widespread struggle. Like many people, I walk around with a cubicle in my pocket—a relentless call to work. A lawyer friend told me, “I quit the Work/Life Balance Committee at my firm. When they asked me why, I said, ‘My work/life balance requires that I go to fewer meetings.’ They were not amused.” I’ve heard dozens of suggestions about how to get better control of my time, but I didn’t want to weigh the merits of multitasking, or organize my emails according to priority, or download an app to get better organized. I needed to think bigger. (Bigger!)
I always have the feeling that I should be working. I always feel pressed for time, as if someone were shoving a pistol in my back and muttering “Move, move, move!” I should start that new chapter. I should work through my notes on that book. I should look up that reference. I’m lucky: I love all this work, and I look forward to working. But my feeling that I should be working, or my choice to work instead of doing other things that are also important, sometimes interferes with my long-term happiness.
Because I feel this perpetual pull toward my desk, there has always been a tension between my work and other parts of my life, but technology has greatly exacerbated it, for two reasons.
First, technology allows me to work anywhere. When I was clerking, by contrast, leaving the office meant leaving work behind; Justice O’Connor certainly never called me at home. Nowadays, writing is something—usually for better, but sometimes for worse—that I can do anyplace, so being “at home” doesn’t provide the same feeling of contrast or refuge. It’s wonderful to have a schedule free from time-wasting meetings or a long commute (commuting, highly correlated with stress and social isolation, is a major source of unhappiness), and I love working, and I love being able to wear yoga pants practically every day of my life, but on the other hand, my laptop travels everywhere with me. As Frank Lloyd Wright said, “Where I am, there my office is: my office me.” Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Including holidays.
Also, technology has created new kinds of work that seem to demand constant, immediate attention. I should answer my emails. I should look at that link. I should check Facebook and Twitter. When I interviewed personal finance expert Manisha Thakor, she gruesomely observed, “The Internet is both my lifeline and the plastic bag over my head.” What’s more, these kinds of online tasks give me an easy way to be fake-produ
ctive. One of my Secrets of Adulthood: Working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination.
“I’m so distracted all the time,” a friend declared. “My attention jumps from my kids to office politics to the news. I’m not giving my real attention to anything. I can never do any real thinking.”
“I don’t feel distracted, I feel hunted,” another friend protested. “There’s always something to read or answer. Ten years ago, my co-workers didn’t call me on the weekends, so why do we email back and forth at ten p.m. on Saturday nights?”
Different people use different solutions to control the cubicle in their pockets. I loved one friend’s strategy: the footer of her emails reads, “Please note: This in-box does not appreciate long emails.” Some people, whether religious or not, observe a technology Sabbath. “No email, no calls, no checking the Internet. I don’t even read nonfiction,” a writer friend told me. “Novels only.” One friend has two BlackBerrys: one for work emails, one for personal emails. “I just couldn’t manage it, when all the emails came together,” she explained. Another doesn’t read email or answer the phone for the first two hours of the day, so he can use that time to work on his priority items. Another friend managed to stay off email during a week’s vacation by not allowing herself to recharge her cell phone.
One friend told me he didn’t answer email on the weekend. “But on Monday morning, how do you face the huge buildup you’ve accumulated?” I asked. “I check my email constantly, just to stay on top of it.” (That’s treadmill hurry.) One study reported that the average American employee spends 107 minutes on email each day, but I often clocked much more than that.
“Actually,” he confided, “I do read and answer email, but my emails don’t get sent out until Monday morning. That way, I enforce the expectation that I won’t be answering email, and I don’t get into back-and-forth exchanges over the weekend.”