Happier at Home Read online

  “No, I don’t think that,” I said. His assumption didn’t surprise me, however, because I’d received similar criticism in the past.

  “You wrote this self-help book—”

  “No, I wouldn’t describe my book as self-help. Though it is … self-helpful.” Many of the greatest figures in history made a study of happiness. When had the desire for self-knowledge and self-mastery become branded as self-help snake oil? “I write in the tradition of Montaigne, Johnson, La Rochefoucauld, Thoreau—at least, I try to.” Like he cared.

  “Well, you argue that people should aim never to experience negative emotions.”

  “I never argue that,” I answered in a weary tone. “I don’t believe that.”

  The conversation then turned to a more specific discussion of happiness and health, but I hung up the phone unsatisfied. I wished we’d argued out the subject.

  The aim of a happiness project is not to eliminate all forms of unhappiness from life. Given the reality of existence, as well as human nature, that’s not possible, and even if it were possible, it’s not desirable.

  Negative emotions—up to a point—can play a very helpful role in a happy life. They’re powerful, flashy signs that something isn’t right. They often prod me into action.

  The First Splendid Truth holds that to be happier, I have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. “Feeling bad” is an important element. In fact, one principal reason I started my happiness project was to eliminate bad feelings from guilt, resentment, and boredom. Guilt for losing my patience with my children. Resentment toward Jamie for his failure to award me gold stars. Boredom with activities that I thought I “ought” to find fun. What’s more, beyond the boundaries of my personal experience, the pain of seeing others’ pain incited me to take action—whether on behalf of people in my life, or out in the world.

  Bad feelings are useful in another way, as well. One key to happiness is self-knowledge, and yet it’s very, very hard to know myself—especially painful aspects that I want to deny. Negative emotions highlight things I try to conceal. For example, when I was thinking of switching careers from law to writing, the uncomfortable emotion of envy helped show me what I really wanted. When I read class notes in my alumni magazine, I felt only mild interest in most careers, including the people with interesting legal jobs; I envied the writers.

  Lying, too, can be an important signal. A friend told me, “I knew I had to get control of my children’s TV time when I heard myself lying to the pediatrician about how much TV they watched.” Another friend admitted, “In my new job, I can walk to work. I kept telling people I did walk to work, but really, I didn’t. I decided I had to be honest, and then I really did start walking.”

  Of course, as Samuel Johnson pointed out, “The medicine, which, rightly applied, has power to cure, has, when rashness or ignorance prescribes it, the same power to destroy.” The bitter medicine of negative emotions can be helpful within a certain range, but if it creates severe unhappiness—or certainly depression—it can become so painful that it interferes with normal life.

  An important exercise for happiness, I realized, was to look for ways to eliminate the causes of unhappiness, or if that wasn’t possible, to deal constructively with negative emotions and difficult situations. Within my family, it was more fun to talk to my sister about the Eleusis project than to talk to my parents about durable powers of attorney, but both kinds of conversations had a role to play in a happy life.

  Whether or not we live with our family under the same roof, or whether we’re even in contact with the members of our family, our relationship to our family is an influence on our happiness—for better or for worse. Adam Smith observed:

  With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other; where freedom and fondness, mutual railery and mutual kindness, shew that no opposition of interest divides the brothers, nor any rivalship of favours sets the sisters at variance, and where every thing presents us with the idea of peace, cheerfulness, harmony, and contentment?

  Few families attain the ideal that Adam Smith sketches with such appeal, and I certainly didn’t always play my part to contribute to the atmosphere of peace, cheerfulness, harmony, and contentment within my own family—but to strive for it, and to work toward it, for me, was an important element of being happier at home.

  April

  NEIGHBORHOOD

  Embrace Here

  Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.

  —Gertrude Stein, Paris France

  - Be a tourist without leaving home

  - Practice nonrandom acts of kindness

  - Find my own Calcutta

  (- Create a secret place)

  For this month, I wanted to concentrate on the sense of home I felt outside my apartment. April, with its warmer weather, was a good month to think about my neighborhood, because I no longer had to rush from door to door to avoid the cold. My more leisurely daily walks heightened my desire to engage with the places and people around me.

  I’ve never had much wanderlust, and for a long time, I felt apologetic about my lack of passion for traveling. Didn’t my love of hanging around my own apartment instead of exploring the world show a lack of adventurousness, a limited curiosity about other cultures, a cramped sense of possibility? (Not to mention an overdependence on the availability of diet soda.) But when I pushed myself to “Be Gretchen” and accept my real likes and dislikes, I faced up to this truth about myself.

  Partly, it’s because I don’t have much interest in many things that other people travel to find. I’m a picky eater, so going to new restaurants or trying a foreign cuisine isn’t particularly fun. I dislike shopping. I like visiting museums—to a point. I don’t speak any other languages. I don’t have many friends who live abroad. I don’t have a passion such as hiking, art collecting, or bird-watching to give me a reason to travel. Every once in a while, I spend the day without stepping foot outside our apartment, and I consider it a great treat. I love a staycation.

  I wouldn’t want to live anyplace except New York City. (Jamie wouldn’t, either; not only does he live in the city where he grew up, but he also lives on the same block where he grew up.) Every day, New York makes me happy, and when I feel unhappy, I sometimes comfort myself with thoughts of the city around me. Its immensity soothes me; it’s like the ocean, or a mountain, or a vast prairie. I call this my “Under the Bridge” feeling, after one of my favorite songs, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, about Los Angeles. I love New York’s inexhaustible possibilities: all those apartments lined up along long hallways, countless offices, shops, parks, each one the center of its own universe. What waits behind all those doors? And New York City buildings share a strange, magical quality; they’re always bigger on the inside than they appear from the outside.

  At night, if I can’t sleep, I walk from room to room in our apartment to look at the sleeping faces of my family—safe, safe, safe—then I stand by the window in the dark and gaze across the street to the dark buildings there. I’m always cheered to see a few glowing lights, signs of neighbors nearby. I remember walking down Lexington Avenue on 9/11, in shock, thinking, “Is all this under threat? Could it be wiped away?” I took comfort in the solid, familiar life around me.

  At the same time, however, I knew that people who travel to new places and try new things are happier than those who stick only to the familiar. New experiences stoke my imagination, too; I get fresh ideas and creative energy from traveling, even if I don’t particularly look forward to doing it.

  Given my responsibilities, I wouldn’t have been able to leave home much, even if I’d wanted to—and I didn’t want to. Instead, this month I’d try to combine the pleasures of bein
g at home and on holiday, by making an effort to see the familiar with new eyes. To do more to appreciate my neighborhood, I resolved to “Be a tourist without leaving home.” At the same time, to be a better neighbor, I resolved to “Practice nonrandom acts of kindness” as well as to “Find my own Calcutta”—that is, to find the cause to which I felt a singular obligation. And although I didn’t know it when the month started, April would include another resolution, as well.

  I also vowed to make an album of the family photographs I’d taken since January.

  BE A TOURIST WITHOUT LEAVING HOME

  New York City is the place where my dentist has his office, and where I buy paper towels, but it’s also one of the great cities of the world. People travel across the world to come here, and I’ve never even visited the Statue of Liberty. It’s easy to let the city fade into backdrop, so in April, I wanted to heighten my appreciation for it—its grandeur, its possibilities, its treasures. After all, research shows that people who remind themselves of the excellence and beauty in their lives have a greater sense of meaning and happiness.

  And New York City, to me, is more than a collection of monuments. Historian Mircea Eliade describes the “privileged places” of our lives, which might include “a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the ‘holy places’ of his private universe.” I had my own private landmarks, my personal historical sites, my favorite corners.

  To appreciate the public treasures of the city, and my private “holy places,” I resolved to “Be a tourist without leaving home.”

  “Be a tourist” didn’t mean visiting every tourist spot—Ellis Island, the Cloisters, Radio City Music Hall, the American Girl store. It meant having the eye and the enthusiasm of a tourist: a tourist reads and studies, a tourist shows up, a tourist sees things with fresh eyes.

  Without quite realizing it, I’d done this “Be a tourist” exercise the last time I visited New Haven. Because I went to Yale for both college and law school, returning there always evokes powerful emotions. In particular, because Jamie and I met in law school, I have many happy memories of our relationship’s early days. The last time I was back, I decided to return to some important sites in our falling-in-love history. I visited our carrels in the law library; the stone staircase where we stood talking; the Copper Kitchen diner where we once met for breakfast; the wooden bench where we held hands for the first time. I took photos of every site.

  Everything changes, and the Copper Kitchen is already gone, and one day the wooden bench and even the stone staircase will be gone, but I have my record.

  Gertrude Stein remarked, “Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.” My city is interesting and beautiful to me—simply because I live here. I made a list of how to “Be a tourist without leaving home.”

  Call up past memories. As I traveled the streets each day, I made an effort to recall important memories. There’s the Gymboree where Jamie and I stopped to buy red tights for Eliza as we walked to the hospital when I was in labor with Eleanor. There’s the corner at Sixty-ninth and Third Avenue where I said to Jamie, “Really, you could write an admiring biography of Churchill, or a damning biography of Churchill, and they’d both be true,” and Jamie answered, “You could write a biography like that,” and inspired me to write Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill. There’s the building where my father-in-law works. There’s the Cottage, the Chinese restaurant where my sister and I ate when I visited her when she was in college. There’s the green market where my brother- and sister-in-law did a demonstration from their cookbook, The Comfort of Apples. Every year, more places take on more meaning.

  See things with fresh eyes. As I walked down the street, I tried to see the city as a tourist, reporter, or researcher would see it (and I noticed stores just a few blocks from my building that I’d never seen before). I paid more attention to the rhythms of my New York—the daily procession of families walking up the long sidewalks to school; the people stopping at corner fruit stands before heading down to the subway. Watching Woody Allen’s New York City movies—Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Husbands and Wives, Manhattan—made me see the city anew.

  Notice the scents. Since I’d adopted February’s resolution to “Embrace good smells,” I’d started to do a better job of noticing New York smells. In the past, unless confronted with a powerful stench, such as the stink of a passing garbage truck, I hardly noticed the smells I encountered on every walk. Now I paid close attention to the hot, dusty scent of pavement when it begins to rain, the smell of fresh wood and turpentine in front of a building site, or the particular subway smell. I was puzzled by some olfactory mysteries: Why did this residential side street always smell like movie popcorn, and why did Third Avenue suddenly smell like an October bonfire? What ingredients combined to give all chain drugstores that inevitable odor?

  Learn more. One thing that I admire about my father is his encyclopedic knowledge of Kansas City; whenever I ask about the history of a particular neighborhood, or about a building under construction, he always knows the answer. I wanted to learn more about New York. Whenever I visited a foreign city, I read a guidebook, and so I read guidebooks for New York City, such as Ten Architectural Walks in Manhattan and Manhattan’s Outdoor Sculpture. I’d visited the giant bronze Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park dozens of times, and learning that Alice was said to resemble the sculptor’s daughter helped me appreciate it more. I spent more time reading the Metropolitan section of the New York Times and the Greater New York section of the Wall Street Journal. We’d owned a copy of Kenneth Jackson’s enormous Encyclopedia of New York City for years; I moved it from a high shelf to the coffee table, and browsed whenever I had a minute.

  Go off the path. The weekly adventures with Eliza had given me the chance to visit new places right in my neighborhood. I’d lived less than ten blocks from the Asia Society for more than ten years, and I’d never walked through its doors until Eliza and I made a Wednesday visit. Along the same lines, when I was driving the car instead of riding in the car, streets that I’d traveled many times before looked new.

  Spend time on The New Yorker magazine meditation. Ever since I was very young, looking at the covers of The New Yorker magazine has filled me with a strong emotion—neither happy nor sad, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but a feeling of sharp yearning for New York City. And not the New York that is my New York, but rather the New York that I rarely inhabit, the city of Yankees games, Shakespeare in the Park, rides on the Staten Island ferry, walks through Williamsburg, commutes to Connecticut. To embrace this New Yorker feeling, I indulged in a modest splurge and bought a used copy of the enthralling The Complete Book of Covers from “The New Yorker,” 1925–1989. Eliza, Eleanor, and I pored over its pages for hours. These pictures invoked the real and unreal New York City of my imagination.

  Being a tourist is a state of mind.

  PRACTICE NONRANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

  Of all the elements that make up a neighborhood, the most important are the neighbors, and I wanted to act with greater neighborliness, to work harder to add to the happiness of the people I encountered in my day, in my building, or during my usual routine. This led me to two questions: Did my presence make people happier? And did my actions contribute to conditions that tended to increase other people’s happiness? As I considered these questions, it occurred to me that I’d often heard the suggestion that a good way to spread happiness was to “Practice random acts of kindness.” But I disagree.

  Yes, if I commit a random act of kindness, I will feel happier—say, if I pay the toll for the car behind me, or put coins in a stranger’s parking meter. That’s the Second Splendid Truth, Part A, otherwise summarized as “Do good, feel good.” However, research suggests that many people react to receiving a random
act of kindness with—suspicion!

  That’s certainly true of me. If someone does something randomly kind for me, I’m on guard. I don’t think that my reaction shows cynicism or a deep distrust of mankind; it’s not the kindness of the act that’s the problem; it’s the randomness. If a stranger hands me a dollar bill, I suspect he’s trying to invoke the strong psychological phenomenon of “reciprocation” (when someone gives you something or does something for you, you feel you should reciprocate). Reciprocation is why members of the Hare Krishna Society gave flowers to passers-by in airports, and why charities send complimentary address labels when they ask for money. Also, a random act of kindness might not be well placed. I might pay the toll for a millionaire, or fill the expired meter for someone who is standing beside me on the sidewalk, ready to drive away in her car. A friend told me that he’d once been stopped on the street by a large man who announced, “I’m giving away free hugs!” and hugged him. This hug, though free and a quite random act of kindness, was not appreciated.

  It’s nice to be nice, of course. It’s not bad to practice random acts of kindness. But to build my happiness based on the happiness I bring to other people—the noblest ways of boosting happiness—I wanted to perform more nonrandom acts of kindness. After all, seeing that a stranger, friend, or colleague was acting out of concern for me was cheering; wondering why someone inexplicably did something unexpected for me, however nice, was a bit unnerving.

  A friend told me about her wonderful nonrandom act of kindness. On April 15 a few years ago, she walked into a post office crowded with people who needed to mail their tax returns and took her place in a huge line for the only stamp-dispensing machine. When my friend’s turn finally came, instead of buying the minimum number of stamps, she bought a whole sheet of stamps. Then she went along the line of people behind her, handing stamps to each person, until she ran out. The people who got the free stamps were thrilled—and even the people who didn’t get free stamps were happy, because the long, slow line got so much shorter so quickly. Everyone, she said, was surprised, excited, and laughing.