CONTENTS

A NOTE TO THE READER

xi

PREPARATION
1

se p t e m be r: POSSESSIONS
Find a True Simplicity
19

oc tobe r: MARRIAGE
Prove My Love
61

nov e m be r: PARENTHOOD
Pay Attention
85

dec e m be r: INTERIOR DESIGN

Renovate Myself
105

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 Contents

ja n ua ry: TIME
Cram My Day with What I Love
129

f e brua ry: BODY

Experience the Experience
163

m a rc h: FAMILY
Hold More Tightly
187

a p r i l: NEIGHBORHOOD
Embrace Here
217

m ay: NOW
Remember Now
245

Afterword 255

Acknowledgments 257

Your Happiness Project 259

The Eight Splendid Truths 263

Secrets of Adulthood 265

Suggestions for Further Reading 277

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 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
I
n 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
˜ Suffer for fifteen a fresh burst of resolution-keeping zeal. But
minutes along with keeping my monthly resolutions,
˜ Go on monthly I wanted to experiment with an additional
adventures with Jamie 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

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 Happier at Home

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 proj-
ect 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

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 January: Time

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 un-
hurriedness 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

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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 courte-
sies 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

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 January: Time

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 observa-
tion. 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

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 Happier at Home

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 con-
tribute 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 ter-
rifically important for good health, plus I knew that I felt happier—at
once more calm and more energetic—when I went to the gym regu-
larly. 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

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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 chil-
dren’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 re-
quires 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

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“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 tech-
nology has greatly exacerbated it, for two reasons.
First, technology allows me to work anywhere. When I was clerk-
ing, 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 every-
where 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 de-
mand 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-productive. 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

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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 man-
aged 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 accumu-
lated?” 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.”
“But that means you’re still answering emails on the weekend,” I
pointed out.

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“True, but I don’t really mind. This way, I keep the volume lower
and answer only at a convenient time.”
Technology is a good servant but a bad master, and technology can
be used to restrain technology. Some people use computer programs
to block their Internet access during certain periods, so they have to
reboot to get online. A friend working frantically to meet a writing
deadline set her email’s automatic reply to read, “If this is an urgent
matter, please contact my husband at ————.” She figured, rightly,
that for a real emergency, people would contact her husband, but that
they’d think hard before they did.
But I knew I shouldn’t really blame technology. The real problem
wasn’t the switch on my computer, but the switch inside my mind. To
be more focused, I came up with eight rules for controlling the cubicle
in my pocket:

• When I’m with my family, I put away my phone, iPad, and lap-
top. Often, I’m tempted to check email not because I expect any urgent
message, but because I’m a bit bored—standing around in the gro-
cery store while Eliza takes forever to choose the snack to take to the
school party, or watching Eleanor finish, with maddening precision,
the twenty flowers she draws at the bottom of every picture. If these
devices are around, it’s hard for me to resist them, yet nothing is more
poignant than seeing a child sit ignored beside a parent who is gazing
into a screen. (I still get distracted by newspapers, magazines, books,
and the mail, but this rule helps.)
• I don’t check my email or talk on the phone when I’m traveling
from one place to another, whether by foot, bus, subway, or taxi. I used
to press myself to use that time efficiently, but then I realized that many
of my most important ideas have come to me in these loose moments.
As Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, “My mind works in idleness. To

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 January: Time

do nothing is often my most profitable way.” (Along the same lines, a

friend met her husband when they sat across from each other on a bus.
If they’d been busy with their devices, they never would have spoken.)
• Whenever I work at home, I get pulled online to tackle various
tasks, so to do the intellectually demanding work of writing, I leave my
home office and my three beloved computer monitors to work at the
wonderful old library that’s just a block from my apartment. Instead
of trying to resist the siren call of email, Facebook, Twitter, my blog,
and the phone, I put them out of reach—another way to “Abandon
my self-control.” Also, the atmosphere of a library helps me to think.
When I want to take a break, instead of heading to the kitchen for a
snack, I wander among the many floors of books.
• I don’t check email at bedtime. I love ending the day with an emp-
tier in-box, but the stimulation of reading emails wakes me right up,
and as a consequence, I often have trouble falling asleep. Unless some-
one is crying, throwing up, or smells smoke, sleep is my first priority.
• I mute my cell phone. Someone coined the term “fauxcellarm”
to describe the jumpy feeling you get when you imagine that your cell
phone is ringing.
• If possible, I do my heavy writing in the morning. I wasn’t sur-
prised to learn that most people work at peak efficiency a few hours
after they wake up, for a period of about four hours. According to
that research, my prime work hours would stretch from 9 a.m. to
1 p.m.—which is exactly right. However . . .
• In violation of the advice of most efficiency experts, who argue
that people should work first on their own priorities, I start my day by
tackling my email. For a while, I tried to do original writing in the
hour between 6 and 7 a.m., when I work at my desk before my family
is awake, but I found that I couldn’t concentrate until I’d read through
my in-box.

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• I embrace the fact that I do a lot of connecting with friends

and acquaintances through technology. Although nothing replaces
face-to-face meetings, it’s better to use those tools than not to connect
at all.

These steps helped me feel calmer and more focused, but I won-
dered whether they were making me less productive. I was reassured,
therefore, to see research showing that when people were interrupted
to respond to email or IM, they needed about fifteen minutes to resume
a serious mental task. Maintaining a single focus would actually help
me work more efficiently.
Of course, I was extremely fortunate to have such flexible work. In
fact, one of my gratitude exercises was to remind myself how much I
loved my work, every time I sat down at the computer. Compared to
many people, I had enormous control over my time; but that wouldn’t
do me any good if I didn’t use that flexibility to give my life the shape
I wanted.
In September, when I’d thought about my possessions, I’d realized
that I shouldn’t focus on having less or having more, but on loving what
I had; with time, I thought, I shouldn’t focus on doing less or doing more,
but doing what I valued. Instead of pursuing the impossible goal of “bal-
ance,” I sought to cram my days with the activities I loved—which
also meant making time for rereading, playing, taking notes without a
purpose, and wandering. I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if
I wasn’t sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time—
but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was “productive.”
Time spent with my family and friends was never wasted. My office
was my workplace, but it was also my playground, my backyard, my
tree house.

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GUARD MY CHILDREN’S FREE TIME

One of the main happiness differences between adults and children is

their control of time. Although adults often complain about not being
in control of their time, children face a different kind of lack of control.
As a parent, I have tremendous influence over what my daughters do
with their time when they’re home from school.
As we were considering Eliza’s after-school schedule for the new
semester, I felt pulled in different directions. So many classes, so many
opportunities! If she wanted, she could learn anything, from Chinese
to chess to cello. Such activities would be enjoyable and enriching—
plus the careerist part of me noted that they’d be useful on future ap-
plications and résumés. But what about a lesson Eliza didn’t want? For
instance, I’d become preoccupied with the idea of piano lessons. If she
was ever going to take piano, she should probably start now. But she
didn’t want to take piano lessons. Should Jamie and I insist? Like many
parents, we wanted to give our children every advantage we possibly
could. We felt incredibly lucky to be in a position to provide lessons,
but that didn’t help us decide whether to provide them—or impose
them.
I could muster several arguments for making Eliza take piano les-
sons. Surely the knowledge of music, the discipline of practice, and the
mastery of a skill would enhance her life. We don’t have a piano, but
Jamie’s parents do, and they live right around the corner from us— right
around the corner. (It’s just 106 steps from our building to their build-
ing. Eleanor counted.) My mother-in-law, Judy, is a music nut, and I
knew she’d love to have Eliza dropping by their apartment to practice.
I raised the piano lesson question with several of my friends. “The

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thing is, if you stick with something long enough, you get good at it,
then you enjoy it,” a friend argued.
“Well . . .” I said slowly, thinking. Was that really true?
“And without a parent making you persist, you give up. I hated prac-
ticing the violin, so my parents let me quit, and now I really regret it.”
“Do you think that you hate doing something for years, then you
love it?” I asked. “That’s never happened to me, and it just doesn’t strike
me as the way human nature generally operates. Also, the key to mas-
tery is practice. If you hate practicing the violin, you’ll probably never
get good enough to enjoy it.”
She looked doubtful, but it was true: The sheer numbers of hours of
deliberate training is the factor that distinguishes elite from lesser per-
formers. Persistence is more important to mastery than innate ability,
because the single most important element in developing an expertise
is the willingness to practice, and while you can make a child practice,
you can’t make a child want to practice. On the flip side, although we
often enjoy activities more when we’re good at them, facility doesn’t
guarantee enjoyment, whether in work or play. In fact, being good at
something can sometimes mask the fact that it’s not enjoyable. I was
very good at lawyerly work, which I suspect delayed my realization
that I wanted a different career.
“Anyway, if you really want to play the violin, you could take les-
sons,” I pointed out to her. “I know adults who are learning to play
instruments.”
“Well, I’m not going to learn it now,” she said dismissively. Ah, it’s
so easy to wish that we’d made an effort in the past, so that we’d happily
be enjoying the benefit now, but when now is the time when that effort
must be made, as it always is, that prospect is much less inviting.
“Practicing builds discipline,” another friend pointed out. “If you
don’t like practicing, then it’s an even better way to develop discipline.”

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I’m very self-disciplined, and it’s an exceedingly helpful quality to

possess. But at the same time, I see the risks of self-discipline; I’m very
good at making myself do things that I don’t want to do, but sometimes
I’m better off not doing those things at all. Self-discipline for the sake of
self-discipline seems an arid pursuit. As Samuel Johnson observed, “All
severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.”
In any event, school was supplying Eliza with ample opportunities to
develop that kind of self-regulation. Should home also impose the dis-
cipline of required study?
I could see the value of piano lessons, but on the other hand, I was
a passionate believer in the value of free time, especially for children,
including time that appears fairly aimless. Philosopher Bertrand Rus-
sell recalled his childhood days:

In solitude I used to wander about the garden, alternately collecting

birds’ eggs and meditating on the flight of time. If I may judge by my
own recollections, the important and formative impressions of child-
hood rise to consciousness only in fugitive moments in the midst of
childish occupations, and are never mentioned to adults. I think peri-
ods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without
are important in youth because they give time for the formation of
these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.

As an admittedly, and quite possibly excessively, Type-A parent, I

wanted my daughters to use their time productively—but I also knew
that valuable activities don’t always appear valuable. Walter Murch, the
Academy Award–winning film editor and sound designer, recalled,
“I’m doing now, at fifty-eight, almost exactly what most excited me
when I was eleven. But I went through a whole late-adolescent phase
when I thought: Splicing sounds together can’t be a real occupation,

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maybe I should be a geologist or teach art history.” One friend of mine

continued to play with her dollhouse well into her teens, and now she’s
an interior decorator. Another friend spent time in law school guilt-
ily playing video games, then left law to join a video game company;
what was the waste of time, his video games or law school? Elizabeth
once told me with a sigh, “I just wish I’d spent more time watching TV
as a child.” Because now she’s a TV writer! As a child, I spent count-
less hours taking notes on what I read, copying passages into blank
books, and illustrating these quotations with pictures clipped from
magazines—exactly the kind of work I do now on my website. Many
people argue that children should be required to try many different
kinds of activities, to help them develop interests, but do those activi-
ties actually create new interests, where ones don’t already exist? Was
there even a risk of squelching a budding interest, by turning it from
child-chosen play into a parents’ assignment?
As parents, we want our children to use their time fruitfully and
to make choices that will make them happy, and we want to see them
safely settled in the world. But I recognize that my desire to keep Eliza
and Eleanor productive and safe could be dangerous. “You’re bet-
ter off being a professor/lawyer/accountant/teacher/married,” many
parents advise. “It’s less risky.” I know many people who started out
on a “safe,” parent-approved track, only to leave it—voluntarily or
involuntarily—after they’d spent a lot of time, effort, and money to
pursue a course that had never attracted them. Now that I’m a parent, I
marvel at the encouragement my own parents gave me when I decided
to leave law to try to become a writer; it’s painful to see your chil-
dren risk failure or disappointment, or pursue activities that seem like
a waste of time, effort, and money. But we parents don’t really know
what’s safe, or a waste of time.

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So what should Jamie and I do: Insist on piano lessons, or let Eliza
skip them?
Perhaps Eliza would enjoy playing the piano if we made her take
lessons, or maybe not, and maybe she’d gain in self-discipline, or maybe
not. But there was another critical factor to consider: opportunity cost.
This term from economics describes the fact that making any par-
ticular choice means forgoing alternatives. Practicing the piano for an
hour meant renouncing all the other activities that might otherwise be
pursued. What would Eliza do with her time, if she were unoccupied?
She’d only know if we left her free to decide.
The credential-hoarding, college-admissions-minded part of me
wanted to see Eliza accumulate accomplishments, but the wiser part
of me argued that one of the most important lessons of childhood is
discovering what you like to do. If, before heading off to law school,
I’d considered the activities that I’d always pursued in my free time,
I might have started a career in writing sooner. I don’t regret what I
did; I had a wonderful time in law school and loved my brief time
working as a lawyer. But my legal experience easily might have been
much less satisfying, or I might never have mustered up the courage
to try writing.
As children or adults, when we’re faced with unstructured time,
with no obvious direction, no ready stimulation, and no assignments,
we must choose our own occupations—a very instructive necessity.
“Growing up, I was bored out of my mind,” a very creative friend
recalled. “As a consequence, I had an incredibly rich inner life.”
“Yes,” I replied. “Boredom can be important. That’s when you have
to figure out what you want to do.”
After a month of sporadic debate, Jamie and I decided to continue
to “Guard our children’s free time”—from ourselves. We wanted Eliza

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to “Be Eliza,” even if that meant skipping piano lessons. We wanted

her free hours at home to be an opportunity for exploration and choice.
“See the child you have,” as the saying goes, “not the child you wish
you had.” In the end, I agreed with Michel de Montaigne: “The least
strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the
best occupations are the least forced.”
And what does Eliza do with her free time, when she’s set loose in
the apartment? Does she play chess against herself, perform chemistry
experiments, write sonnets, organize bake sales to benefit an animal
shelter? Nope. She spends hours taking pictures and making videos of
herself, then spends more hours reviewing them. Whether or not this is
what I think she should do, it’s what she does.
“Do you want to take a class about making videos?” I asked. “Editing
techniques, special effects, all that? Why don’t you join the after-school
club where they make stop-motion movies?”
“No,” Eliza shook her head. “I don’t want to have to learn along
with a bunch of people. I like figuring it out myself and doing my own
thing.”
“Would you like to read a book about it?”
“Sure,” she said. I got her a book about making videos on a Mac.
And also a book about Cindy Sherman.

SUFFER FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES

Routine doesn’t deserve its bad reputation. It’s true that novelty and
challenge bring happiness, and that people who break their routines,
try new things, and go to new places are happier, but routine can also
bring happiness. The pleasure of doing the same thing, in the same way,
every day, shouldn’t be overlooked. The things I do every day take on

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a certain beauty and provide a kind of invisible architecture to my life.

Andy Warhol wrote, “Either once only, or every day. If you do something
once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do
it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.”
I wanted to harness the power of routine to accomplish some
long-procrastinated tasks; what I do almost every day matters more
than what I do once in a while. My First Splendid Truth holds that to be
happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an
atmosphere of growth. While many of my resolutions were meant to add
more feeling good to my life, I decided to devote fifteen minutes a day to
rid myself of something that made me feel bad. Fifteen minutes! I could
do anything for fifteen minutes.
I knew exactly what I wanted to tackle first; I’d been stewing about
it ever since I worked on my Shrine to My Family in September. My
failure to cope with our family photographs was a constant, gnawing
worry. I faithfully took photos and videos of our family, but I’d fallen
far behind in turning them into a more permanent form.
I’m a big believer in the importance of family photos. Recalling
happy memories from the past gives a boost to happiness in the present,
and looking at photographs of beloved people is an easy way to engi-
neer a mood boost.
Also, prompts like photo albums, mementos, and journals are excel-
lent aides to memory. Looking at photographs helps people to recall
memories more clearly and also to remember much more than what’s
shown in the picture. I tend to forget huge swaths of the past, but look-
ing at photographs helps me recall the little happy details that would
otherwise be lost.
When we were in Kansas City over the holidays, I’d arranged for
a professional photographer to take our family photograph. It was ex-
pensive, but because family photographs are among my most precious

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possessions, this splurge gave me great bang for the happiness buck.
Nevertheless, although I loved these high-quality heirloom photo-
graphs, the casual snapshots I took were just as important. They pro-
vided a kind of family diary, a record of our everyday life and its minor
milestones and celebrations. I would never have imagined that I could
forget Eliza’s excitement in showing off her newly pierced ears, or Elea-
nor’s toddler habit of constantly reaching for her belly button, yet when
I caught sight of these photos, I realized with alarm that my memories
had already started to fade.
I’d always loved family pictures, but the arrival of the digital cam-
era had changed the way I dealt with them. With my old camera, I’d
shoot a roll or two of film, drop it off at the photo shop, pick it up a
few days later, and after I had a good stack, spend a few hours arrang-
ing photos in a photo album while watching TV. I ended up with some
blurry photos, and some red-eye, but even so, I had wonderful albums.
These days, digital cameras make it much easier to take and improve
photos—but that was a curse as well as a blessing. I liked taking pho-
tographs, but turning them into permanent keepsakes now took a lot
more effort. I used Shutterfly to make digital albums, and with that
technology, I could eliminate red-eye, crop, and write captions, which
was wonderful, but it took time. And it wasn’t time spent watching The
Office reruns while mindlessly pasting in photos, as I used to do; it was
time hunched in front of the computer, clicking and typing, just as I do
all day long.
Also, working on photo albums was satisfyingly manual; they were
among the few things I created with my own hands.
Manual occupations such as gardening, woodworking, cook-
ing, doing home repairs, caring for pets, working on a car, or knit-
ting can be deeply satisfying on many levels: the physical motion,
the tangibility of the accomplishments, the pleasure of the tools, the

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sensory delights of the materials. (Of course, to some people, these

same activities counted as drudgery. Secret of Adulthood: Just because
something is fun for someone else doesn’t mean it’s fun for you— and
vice versa.) Even activities that are clearly highly creative— editing
a video or designing a website— don’t offer quite the same kind of
tactile gratification, while activities so simple they hardly qualified
as “creative”—building a fire or organizing a drawer—were deeply
satisfying in this concrete way.
I’d never been able to master anything as complicated as needlepoint
(and I’d tried), but even I got satisfaction from handmade creations; as a
child, I stuffed whole cloves into apples to make pomander balls by the
dozens, and I labored over my “blank books” of illustrated quotations;
in college, I handed out beaded bracelets to my friends. I’d enjoyed
making the photo albums. Now, however, making an album meant
more time in front of a screen, and as a result, I never felt like dealing
with it. My camera and phone held an alarming backlog.
Seeing rows of photographs that existed only in digital form made
me anxious, because I worried that a computer crash, or advancing tech-
nology, could wipe them away. A physical album could be destroyed by
fire or flood, but it somehow seemed safer—and it was certainly more
fun to sit with my daughters and turn the pages of an album than it was
to crowd around a screen and scroll through digital images.
On the one hand, I wanted to make a lavish, lovely album—
photographs carefully edited and arranged, with lengthy, well-written
captions to remind us, in future years, of all our adventures. But when-
ever I thought about the task of figuring out again how to turn hun-
dreds of digital photos into albums, I felt desperate. I’d let so much time
go by since the last album that I hardly knew where to start.
I’d been promising myself that I’d organize an album “in my free
time,” but the fact is, I never have any free time. I never wander aim-

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lessly through the apartment, looking for something to do. But making
the album was a priority for me, so I wrote it on my calendar like a visit
to the pediatrician. I would suffer for just fifteen minutes a day.
Starting January 1, each afternoon, I set the timer on my phone for
fifteen minutes and doggedly used the time to work on my photos. (I
amused myself by changing the alarm sound every day. My favorite:
crickets.) I wasn’t going to plan how many days it would take to fin-
ish this job, because I knew that whatever I predicted, it would take
longer: The “planning fallacy” describes the widespread psychological
tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
Maybe it’s an aspect of my all-or-nothing abstainer personality, but
counterintuitively, I’ve found that when I was trying to prod myself to
do something, it came more easily when I did it every day. It was easier
to post to my blog every day of the week than to post three days a
week, easier to go for a twenty-minute walk every day rather than just
some days. No debating “Today or tomorrow?” or “Do I get this day
off?” No excuses.
As it turned out, making the album wasn’t such an awful task, once I
actually got started. At first, it seemed very inefficient to work for such
a short period. I spent the first fifteen minutes just deleting unwanted
photos from my camera.
After I’d eliminated the photos I didn’t want, I had to figure out
how to upload the rest. For the next few sessions, by the time I figured
out what I was supposed to be doing, the time was up, and I didn’t
allow myself to continue into minute sixteen. In the end, I used the
“Simple Path” feature to arrange the pictures automatically. I hesitated
before indulging in this shortcut, then repeated one of my favorite Se-
crets of Adulthood, cribbed from Voltaire: “Don’t let the perfect be the
enemy of the good.” My desire to create the perfect photo album was

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preventing me from working on one at all. I should do a good-enough

job and get it done. I didn’t write captions, I didn’t crop, I didn’t do a lot
of things that would have improved the pictures, but I got the job done.
I was finally completely up to date, and I finished two huge albums.
Ah, the thrill of finally pushing “Order album”!
Once those albums arrived in the mail, I tackled the next phase of
the project, by handwriting captions for the photos. This took sev-
eral sittings, but at last, I finished. My handwriting was messy, and I
could’ve written longer, more interesting captions—but I’d finished. I
felt an enormous sense of relief.
Now that I was caught up, how could I prevent myself from getting
buried under photographs again? I flipped forward a few months in my
calendar and made a note on the day we were scheduled to return from
spring break: “Make a new photo album.”
Once the albums were safely on the shelf, I experienced a phe-
nomenon that I’d noticed over and over with my happiness project:
Completing one challenging task supplies the energy to tackle an-
other challenging task. After the photos were under control, I turned
to the confusing jumble of our family videos, which were stored on
outdated miniature cassette tapes and discs. Dealing with the tapes re-
quired me to do nothing more than pay (a lot) to have them transferred
to DVDs—but I’d procrastinated for years about doing even that. A
messy heap of eight mini-VHS tapes and eight mini-DVDs slimmed
down to three standard DVDs.
My fifteen-minute sufferings showed me how much I could accom-
plish when I did a manageable amount of work, on a regular basis. As
Anthony Trollope, the preternaturally prolific novelist who also man-
aged to revolutionize the British postal service, observed, “A small daily
task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

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This task had seemed so intimidating, but by faithfully doing a small

bit at a time, I’d managed to achieve something large. And really, it
hadn’t been very difficult, once I finally started.

GO ON MONTHLY ADVENTURES WITH JAMIE

Researchers into psychology have long sought to devise the most com-
prehensive, elegant framework to capture the mystery of personality,
and in recent years, the “Big Five” model has emerged as the most use-
ful. It measures personality according to five factors:

1. Openness to experience—breadth of mental associations

2. Conscientiousness—response to inhibition (self- control,
planning)
3. Extraversion—response to reward
4. Agreeableness—regard for others
5. Neuroticism—response to threat
(When put in that order, the five factors spell out the helpful mne-
monic OCEAN.)

When I took the Newcastle Personality Assessor test to measure

myself according to these five factors, I scored as very “conscientious,”
which didn’t surprise me. I always hand in my work on time. I go to
the gym fairly often. I resist most treats. I pay bills promptly. My chil-
dren always get their vaccinations. (Though for some reason, I’ve never
managed to floss regularly.) In fact, my conscientiousness is one of my
favorite things about myself.
Jamie is very conscientious, too. His conscientiousness isn’t always
triggered by the tasks that I wish he’d tackle—for instance, picking up

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phone messages doesn’t make his list—but about things that really mat-
ter, he’s utterly reliable. A wonderful quality in a spouse.
Because we share this inclination, we respect it in each other. I don’t
tell him to get off his laptop, and he doesn’t protest if I say, “I need to
go to the library for a few hours on Saturday.” We both hate to be late,
so we spend a lot of time waiting for airplanes to begin to board or for
movies to start.
Conscientiousness makes many things in life easier, and research
even suggests that this trait may be a key factor in longevity. But there’s
a downside to this conscientiousness: Jamie and I can’t turn it on and
off. A vigilant conscience is a rough taskmaster. As a couple, we work
hard and don’t goof around much. We almost never drink. We spend a
lot of time on the computer. We don’t take much vacation. We rarely
stray from our neighborhood or vary our routine. Although this way
of life generally suits us, I wondered if Jamie and I should have a little
more fun together.
For, just as I needed to be wary of my urge to simplify, I also needed
to guard against becoming too abstemious, too wed to my productive
routines. I didn’t want to go to sleep at 10 p.m. every night. “I now de-
fend myself from temperance as I used to do against voluptuousness,”
Montaigne admitted. “Wisdom has its excesses and has no less need of
moderation than folly.” Or, as I told myself, do nothing in excess, not
even moderation.
Although research shows that novelty and challenge boost happi-
ness, when I started my study of happiness, I was convinced that this
wasn’t true for me. For me, I believed, familiarity and mastery were
keys to happiness. But when I pushed myself, I discovered—no! Even
for someone like me, novelty and challenge serve as huge engines of
happiness. It’s a happiness paradox: Control and mastery bring hap-
piness; so do surprises, novelty, and challenge. In fact, positive events

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make us happier when they’re not predictable, because the surprise

makes the experience more intense.
In the case of couples, novelty and excitement stimulate the brain
chemicals that are present during courtship. Studies show that doing
something “exciting” (something a couple doesn’t usually do, like
biking) gives a bigger romantic boost than doing something “pleas-
ant” (like going to a movie), but even small steps, such as going to
new restaurants or seeing different sets of friends, can help lift marital
happiness.
Nevertheless, Jamie and I both experienced a lot of novelty and
challenge in our work. Sometimes, too much novelty and challenge.
Would we be happier if our marriage was a refuge of comfort, calm,
and order—or should we be more adventurous? On a free night, were
we better off reading in bed and going to sleep early (which is what we
usually felt like doing), or pushing ourselves to go to a cooking class?
Well, the studies were quite clear: We’d be happier if we did new
things. And I wanted to be more active in making fun plans; almost
always, it was Jamie who suggested that we take a trip, see a movie, or
even go out for frozen yogurt. Also, as much as we loved to be with
Eliza and Eleanor, it would be nice to have more adult time. In her
book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, Laura Vanderkam
points out that in general, married people with children tend to spend
less time with each other, alone, than they did in the past. In 1975, they
clocked 12.4 hours each week; by 2000, it was 9.1 hours.
Although I recognized the irony, I decided that we needed to work
harder at play; I would try to schedule time for us to be spontaneous.
But how? My weekly adventures with Eliza gave me an idea. Maybe
Jamie and I could do something like that. As I’d done with the reso-
lution to “Give warm greetings and farewells,” I decided to flout my
Sixth Splendid Truth, “The only person I can change is myself.” For

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the second time, I would break that truth, to try to convince Jamie to
adopt a resolution with me.
I raised the issue with Jamie one night. “You know how Eliza and I
have been doing our weekly adventures?” I asked as we walked down
the street to our apartment.
He nodded. “That’s really a nice thing. I’m glad you’re doing it.
Where did you go yesterday?”
“We went to see an exhibit of children’s book illustrations, lots of
fun. Actually, I was thinking that you and I could do something along
those lines. Not once a week, that’s too often. But how about planning
an adventure, for the two of us, once a month?”
“What do you want to do?” he asked. “Go to the circus?”
“Well, we could walk around some unfamiliar part of town, we
both love doing that. We could go to the Apple store and take an iPad
class. We could go to a great bookstore.”
“Hmmph” was his only response.
I let the issue drop. I knew that sometimes it was helpful to intro-
duce an idea to Jamie, let it sink in, then raise it another day, instead of
bringing it up at thirty-minute intervals, as I’m inclined to do.
I waited a few weeks. Then, when we were waiting for our turn
to go into Eleanor’s parent-teacher conference, I raised the issue again.
“What about the monthly adventures?” I asked. “Do you want to
give that a try?”
Jamie cocked his head thoughtfully, then bent over his phone
without answering. I bit my tongue. “He’s deliberately being rude!” I
thought. “How many times have I told him how much I hate it when
he doesn’t answer me?” Then the resolution to “Make the positive ar-
gument” flashed through my mind, and I reminded myself, “He’s not
deliberately being rude.” And, I realized, he wasn’t. Not deliberately.
Again, I let some weeks pass, then made one final attempt. We’d

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told Eliza and Eleanor that we would let them stay home without a
grown-up for the first time (another bittersweet milestone), so we ran
errands for an hour. On our way home, I said, “So what about the
monthly adventures? What do you think?”
“What monthly adventures?” Jamie asked.
“You know,” I said in a deliberately calm voice, “like the weekly
adventures I do with Eliza, some plan for you and me, once a month.”
“It sounds fun, but so many things are coming up.” Jamie sighed.
“In theory, I’d like to do it, but I just don’t think it would stay on the
calendar. Is that okay?” He put his arm around me.
“It’s okay,” I reassured him. “I understand how you feel.”
I did understand, and I wasn’t going to press the issue further. The
Sixth Splendid Truth was indeed true. In the end, I can make resolu-
tions only for myself. As Elizabeth says of creative projects, “You want
volunteers, not recruits.” I didn’t want to create an occasion for nag-
ging, rescheduling, and resentment between us.
And to be honest, I was a bit relieved by Jamie’s reluctance to
adopt this resolution. Was it really a good idea to add another item to
our already hectic schedules? “My husband and I had a weekly ‘date
night’ for years,” a friend told me, “but lately, all we did on those
nights was argue. Now we set aside that night to relax at home with
our daughter, and we go to bed early. If we fight, at least we’re not
paying a babysitter!”
Jamie and I were in the rush hour of life, and we were busy and tired.
Thanks mostly to Jamie’s efforts, we did make time to go to movies,
just the two of us, and to have the occasional dinner with friends; if
adding a monthly adventure felt like a burden, instead of a treat, we
wouldn’t enjoy it. Maybe in a few years, I’d raise the idea again.

. . .

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Around the same time, at the end of January, my emotional energy

flagged. I felt trapped in a kind of Groundhog Day of happiness (the tim-
ing was fitting, given that the actual Groundhog Day was approach-
ing). When I looked back at my Resolutions Charts from the previous
months, I saw rows of Xs on certain pages; the same resolutions de-
feated me, over and over. I wasn’t making much progress.
I was tired of the persistent dissatisfaction of the shelf-by-shelf exer-
cise. Nothing stayed done; I cleared a shelf, and a few weeks later, it was
covered with another mess. I replaced one lightbulb, then another bulb
burned out. I resented having to get my hair cut again.
Even worse than these repeated, dreary tasks were my faults, which
never seemed to improve. I made the same resolutions, month after
month, and I kept backsliding on some of the most important ones,
over and over. I was weary of myself—my broken promises to do bet-
ter, my small-minded grudges, my wearisome fears, my narrow preoc-
cupations. I spoke sharply to my daughters. I still dreaded driving. I
didn’t appreciate the present moment.
Disagreeable aspects of myself—even those I usually accepted with-
out much unhappiness—nagged at me. My hair twisting, for instance.
I’ve been twisting my red hair my whole life; once I’d expected to out-
grow the habit, but now I know I never will. I wouldn’t be bothered by
my hair twisting, except that I break off my hair (that’s the fun part),
and though other people probably don’t notice, the sight of that ragged
line of broken hair had started to rankle.
Also, my bad temper kept flaring up. One morning, I somehow set
off a muscle spasm when I turned my head at the kitchen sink. It hurt
like crazy, and I had a busy day ahead of me. As was his custom, Jamie
listened to me describe the pain for a few minutes, then adopted an at-
titude of “Well, let’s not let this affect our day.”
Eliza announced, “I’m leaving now,” and we all took a moment to

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give her a warm farewell. Then I said to Jamie, “You make sure Eleanor
gets dressed. I need to take something for the pain.”
Ten minutes later, Jamie stepped out of Eleanor’s room to give me a
good-bye kiss. “I’ve got to go.”
“Is Eleanor already dressed?” I asked in surprise.
“She said she’s going to get dressed herself.”
I glanced into her room. Eleanor sat naked on the floor, obviously
sulking.
“That’s getting her dressed?”
“I’ve got to get to the office.”
I gave Jamie the meanest possible look of disdain and fury. “Then
go,” I snarled.
He went.
For the rest of the day, that snarl bothered me. My neck hurt, I felt
justified in my anger toward Jamie, and yet—my reaction made every-
thing worse. I wanted to apologize, but I thought Jamie should apolo-
gize to me. And he didn’t.
We had pleasant, normal interactions that night, but I felt terrible. It
took a tremendous effort, but I said, “Hey, about this morning, about
that mean face I made. I’m sorry. I was annoyed, but that wasn’t neces-
sary.” Pleased with my nobility, I gave him a hug and a kiss.
“Oh, that’s okay,” Jamie said, as if he hadn’t given my mean face—or
his own lapse—a second thought. Which made me angry all over again.
He hadn’t even noticed my mean face? Or remembered why he so richly
deserved it?
I brooded fruitlessly over the thought that even when I did be-
have myself, or managed to keep a difficult resolution, I rarely got the
gold stars I craved. (Even saintly Thérèse drily admitted that she was
bothered by people’s annoying tendency to ignore good behavior and
pounce on bad behavior: “I noticed this: When one performs her duty,

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never excusing herself, no one knows it; on the contrary, imperfections

appear immediately.”) But couldn’t I behave better—for myself ?
And as much as I worked to be more mindful, I so often fell into my
absentminded, distracted, not-here-now ways. For example, one of my
oldest friends was coming to town from Switzerland, and for weeks,
we’d planned that she’d come over for dinner with her two sons—and
I completely forgot. I didn’t remember until a buzz came from the front
door, and I heard Jamie ask, puzzled, “Nancy who?”
“Nancy! It’s Nancy and her sons!” I jumped up and frantically
started tidying up. “They’re here for dinner!”
“Now?” Jamie said in disbelief.
“Yes, I forgot, they’re here for dinner! Buzz them in!”
Nancy and her sons came upstairs, we ordered pizza, and we had
a lovely evening. Nancy was exceptionally nice about my lapse, and
Jamie thought it was hilarious, but despite the fun of the evening, I
remained agitated. How could I have forgotten something like this?
One of my clearest memories of childhood was walking to the library
with Nancy when we were ten years old! She was too important to
forget. Could I remember nothing without checking my calendar every
few hours?
Not only did I feel disheartened by my own limitations, but I also
felt hunted by the very subject of happiness. No matter how unrelated
a task seemed to be, it always ended up instructing me. I bought a new
subway MetroCard, and when I idly glanced down at it, spotted a hap-
piness quotation from Emerson: “Life is a train of moods like a string
of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored
lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what
lies in its own focus.” Instead of feeling charmed by finding this apt
happiness quotation on such a modest object, I felt badgered by con-
stant reminders to behave myself and mindfully shape my experience.

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 Happier at Home

I wasn’t tired of the subject of happiness, and I didn’t feel pressure

to “be happy” all the time, but I was weary of my own voice, my own
ways of thinking. Just the way that, left to my own devices, I’d buy the
same pieces of clothing over and over (a gray V-neck sweater, a stretchy
orange hoodie, a black cardigan), I felt my thinking falling into the
same worn grooves.
I hauled out my usual bag of happiness cures. I went to sleep earlier.
I reread The Railway Children. I answered some long-postponed emails.
I took some cute pictures of Eliza and Eleanor. I gave everyone an espe-
cially warm greeting and farewell. One of my resolutions is to “Forget
about results” and to take notes without a purpose, so I gave myself a
work break to write a list of ways I violate standard happiness advice:

• Jamie and I have a TV in our bedroom. And it just got bigger.

• We allow Eliza to use the computer in her bedroom without
supervision.
• I make the girls’ beds in the morning instead of insisting that they
do it.
• I never ask my family questions like “Tell me three good things
that happened during your day.”
• I never have date nights with Jamie.
• I don’t make the girls write thank-you notes.
• Whenever possible, I read while I eat.
• Jamie and I listen to all-news radio, all night long.
• I refuse to try meditation.

During this low time, at lunch with a bookish British friend, we

started talking about what we read to cheer ourselves up. (I was look-
ing for suggestions for some further biblio therapy.)

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“I always reach for Samuel Johnson,” he said.

“Really? Me, too! Well, either Johnson or children’s literature,” I an-
swered, delighted to discover a fellow devotee of Dr. Johnson. “I didn’t
know you love Johnson.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve read all his works, many times. Also biographies, and
biographies of John Boswell, too.”
“I love Johnson. I can’t get enough. And he’s one of my most impor-
tant models as a writer.”
“You’re writing a dictionary?”
“Hardly! But his Rambler essays are the eighteenth-century equiva-
lent of posting to a blog—Johnson wrote them twice a week, finished
them fast, on whatever topic he wanted. And I write about the same
kinds of things.”
“But Johnson wrote about such weighty subjects.”
“He wrote about human nature, and that’s what interests me,” I
said. “And the practice of everyday life. Really, I’m a moral essayist,
though I’d never admit that in public. It sounds so boring and preachy.”
“It does sound a bit old-fashioned,” he said, laughing. Then we
started trading our favorite Johnson lines.
“I want to run home right now and reread Boswell’s Life of Johnson,”
I declared as we stood up to leave.
“Me, too. But back to the office.”
He went to the office, but I did go home and immediately start to
reread The Life of Samuel Johnson—which really did make me feel bet-
ter. It was comforting to recall that great souls such as Samuel Johnson,
Benjamin Franklin, Leo Tolstoy, and Saint Thérèse made and remade
the same resolutions throughout their lives. As Johnson admitted to
Boswell, “Sir, are you so grossly ignorant of human nature as not to
know that a man may be very sincere in good principles, without

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 Happier at Home

having good practice?” My principles were sound; my practice would

improve with practice.
And the ironic thing? That afternoon, after all our fuss about
whether to push Eliza to take piano lessons, she walked into the kitchen
and announced, “I’d like to learn to play the guitar.”
“Really? Well . . . sure!” I said.

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