Choosing the Road Not Taken

Is it just me, or do we spend too much of our lives daydreaming?

In my youth, I was always thinking … not really pondering big questions of the meaning of life… but thinking about the next major milestone I would be achieving. Life would be better after 10 years old, when I (finally) had my ears pierced. Life would be so much better after 16, when I could drive sans parents. Life would improve dramatically after 18, when I was “on my own,” and no longer had a curfew. Life would be better after marriage... career... kids... house... and so forth.

For the record, daydreaming can be a very positive pastime. It fosters imagination, and encourages excitement. Who doesn't enjoy imagining how different life will be after an interesting, life-changing event occurs? Who doesn't derive some happiness and positive anticipation from thoughts of a new ring, salary, bundle of joy, vacation destination, etc?

However, too much daydreaming can actually backfire, and prevent true happiness from being realized – for example, when you find yourself spending too much time in absent thought about an upcoming trip to Mexico that you fail to recognize the beauty and warmth of the same Mexican sun on a wonderful spring day in Minnesota.

Now, I'm not a brain expert, but I imagine that so much time thinking about the future builds strong neural tendencies to continue this behavior – long after “traditional” milestones are behind us. As a result, we either create new ways to look forward, or find ourselves enamored with the “good ole' days,” reliving memories to try and feel better about today.

These tendencies to dwell in the past or attempt to predict the future have evoked many emotions – from angst to yearning. Not happiness. And that bothered me. I was tired of being anxious about something that happened earlier. I was bored with reliving 'shining' moments. Anticipation was great in theory, but when the anticipated moment had past, I felt incredibly deflated. Being the bookworm that I am, I started mulling over happiness as a concept, finding many interesting reads along the way – poetry by Rumi, meditations by Thich Nhat Hanh, philosophical musings by Lao Tze, more contemporary analyses by Rubin and Carter. I found myself searching for the source of this discontent.

What did I find? That daydreaming, and my tendency to be preoccupied with past events or anticipating the future were not symptoms of a larger problem. They were the problem. Thus, to achieve a sense of equilibrium and contentment, I needed to abandon the well-trodden neural paths established in my mind, and opt for a newer route, one of mindfulness. 

As a result, I've been working on thought-stopping – not allowing myself to spiral to a new place in my mind when my family is otherwise enjoying time together. I make time to work on meditation, exercise that pushes me, active engagement with my kids, and other things that help to ground me and keep me present with the situations and loved ones around me. For the record, mindfulness still doesn't come easily to me – after all, I had many decades to live my inveterate life of daydreams. It may take a few more to embrace these goals, and solidify this new path. In the meantime, I'll try to make my peace just where I am.

inveterate - stubbornly established by habit

How to Write About Happiness and Not sound like a Self Help Book. Or like I'm Lying.

I really am not good at happy.  At all.  In fact, I loved living in Washington State because the weather invariably matched my mood. It was rainy and cold. Rainy and warm. Rainy and wet. Snow turned to rain.  Rain melted snow.  Clouds came. They stayed.  It was great “sit in a room and drink tea and be morose” weather. It was great weather for reading the French theorists and then arguing why they are (or are not) relevant. It made for great “If I only had x, I’d be happy” thoughts.  It was nice, because I got to put off figuring out how to be happy because it was obviously the weather. Or grad school. Or the fact that I wasn’t settled and hadn’t really started my life yet. If I had the job I really wanted and did not have to go to the Laundromat…well then, I’d be happy…

But now I’m in this part of my life. This part of my life that I always looked forward to as the part where I get to be happy because I would have these great kids who would be multi-lingual and play stringed instruments. I would have this this great job that made my life meaningful and allowed me to contribute to society. And I would have this great person to be with and we would travel to foreign countries with our well behaved multi-lingual children.  The part of my life, this part, that if I’m not enjoying it, it’s my own damn fault.  The part of life where now, sometimes, in my darker moments, I say to myself “I can totally see how people have nervous breakdowns”.

 Maybe it has always been my own fault when I wasn’t happy,  but I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t blame my parents, the childhood bully or the failures of my past for my state of mind. This has been a big responsibility shift. Some people have written that they have found this realization empowering.  They are now in charge. I’ve found it difficult.  

So now I’m left with the task of being happy. Some days I’m good at it. 

I can tickle fight.

And smell flowers.

And listen to birds.

And breathe. 

And notice.

And enjoy.

I love those days--the days when my life more closely lives up to the Hollywood movie version of my life.

Lately, though, my life is more like the independent film version of my life. This is not all bad, but it does mean that there is more peeing in the bathtub (the children) and more cross words at the dinner table (me). It means there are fewer light-hearted montages (with Beatles music in the background) where we take in butterfly wings and watch sunsets. Where we snuggle on the couch and everyone fits. Where we cuddle the kids off to sleep and then sip wine under the starlight.  Instead, it is more cracked corners and out-dated decorating and flat tires than I’d like in this part of my life.

And yet, the cracks and the shag carpet and the flat tires are there. And I think “Dammit.” And “I wish it was a bit easier. I wish there were fewer stains on the carpet and fewer bug corpses in the skylight.”

I wish I could tell you that in these moments I decide to be happy, or grateful or breathe or enjoy the imperfection. 

But I don’t. Most always I don’t. I wallow. I grump. I wish. But not always.

Sometimes, for one quiet second, I can notice the rain start and the train call in the distance while the insistent cardinal continues his song, and
I do.

  

Sigh - breathing in and out

locus - the art of becoming an "innie"

(This was my belly)

 When I was about 12 months pregnant (just kidding, but it felt like it) with my first child, I joked about the turkey timer of my bellybutton popping out from its usual "innie" status to becoming an "outie".  I thought it was a lovely visual analogy for my sense of focus: deeply inward during early and mid-pregnancy, moving slowly outward as it became time to prepare for birth and mothering a child.

My sense of happiness is linked inextricably to motherhood in many, many ways - both my own, and my own mother's.  As a young girl, I was steeped in my mom's favorite sayings, like these beauties:

• if you smile enough, you'll feel happier
• things will always look better in the morning

I watched her own struggle to apply this approach to her own life.  I saw where it bolstered her, and where it sometimes failed her and left her with nothing but her inherent strength to keep her upright.  Oh yeah, that one too:

• keep your chin up

I also watched her struggle with the overwhelming melodrama of dealing with an almost-out-of-control early teenager.  Trying to teach me how to control my own responses to the difficulties a complicated family life and financial hardship was handing me, trying to show me the beauties that were still there.  I didn't pick that up well at all, not for quite a long time.  I put everything I was - or thought I was - into friends or boys, many of them fleeting, some of them even borderline abusive.  Then, at some point, one of mom's sayings clicked for me:

• we make our own happiness

Being angry wasn't getting me anywhere, and there wasn't a single person I had met in my limited years who had been capable of "making me happy".  What a shocking revelation, because isn't "you make me happy"  a key part of all teenage romance stories?  (for that matter, 60% of adult romance stories too, with the remainder composed of, "change because you love me").  I eventually started to pull my sense of self away from the equally-struggling people I had entrusted with it, and remembered that I had a usable brain, a sense of humor, and a sense of ambition of my own.  I found myself gravitating

(This is NOT my belly)

toward friends who already knew or who were discovering the same things.  Somewhere further down the road I read a page in a psychology book detailing the concept of "locus of control":  your locus can either be internal (meaning the person believes that they control their life) or external (meaning they believe that their environment, some higher power, or other people control their decisions and their life).  It was around that time that I had also come to a slow and painstaking conclusion that organized religion didn't make sense to me at all, and the idea that the heartwrenching sense of being at loose ends throughout adolescence could end with me holding the reins of my own life ... nothing before or since has been so empowering.

Of course, in my early days with my husband, I probably still would have said that he made me happy.  Looking back now at our 19 years together (we're one of the weird and lucky couples who met at the end of high school and still like each other), I can say that isn't correct.  I feel good about who I am in his eyes.  His support has helped me to realize and develop my own strengths.   He says things that tickle our shared humor and I enjoy a laugh with him.  When he remembers details about my likes and needs I feel treasured.  When we had difficulty getting pregnant, I was consoled by sharing the stress and pain.  When we were successful and had our daughters, my joy was multiplied by seeing the same in his eyes.  Does he make me happy?  No.  I am happy that I am with him.  But he doesn't MAKE me anything, which has been an absolute key element of our relative success to date.

The very definition of "outie"

So often now I find myself gazing at the petulant face of a peevish 5 year old (yes, there was a birthday party at our house last week) who is screeching, "you do NOT make me happy" at her sister.  I wrack my brain to find a way to share those insights on her level.  I find myself saying, "we make our own happiness...".  I come up short, of course, every time.  She's simply developmentally not ready to be an "innie" yet.

locus:  a center or source, as of activities or power

appliance - refrigerator as sage

A magnet on my refrigerator reads: “I have decided to be happy because it is good for my health.” Research supports the connection between emotional wellbeing and health. But what about the notion that happiness is a choice? Though I tend to think more about contentment and joy than happiness, I subscribe to Abraham Lincoln’s belief that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” As it happens, contemporary studies bear this out as well. (A WebMD article summarizes some of these studies in lay terms.)

If we can indeed choose happiness, the obvious question is: How? As I pondered this question, it occurred to me that I could once again look to my refrigerator for my response.

Commit to the Choice 

You probably know people who believe happiness depends on external circumstances. I’m in regular contact with one of these people, and you know what? That person is right. If you give other people and events the power to determine your happiness, they’ll generally oblige and you’ll generally be miserable. If, on the other hand, you claim responsibility for your own outlook, you’ll enjoy an immediate sense of efficacy that leads to positive thoughts and actions. I’m not talking The Secret’s Law of Attraction or even Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking. Happy thoughts won’t erase poverty or war, bring back lost loved ones, restore sight to my right eye, or land me a job. But my thoughts govern my reactions to unhappy circumstances. If there are practical ways I can make a bad situation better, a positive outlook gives me the confidence to attempt those changes.

Cultivate Gratitude

Even under crummy circumstances, I seek to recognize and appreciate the many good things in life. Most days, I’m bowled over by the extravagance of these things: vision in my left eye that is better than it was ten years ago, two garbage bags filled with hand-me-down clothes for my daughter, free books at the library, a dog who greets my arrival like I’m a rock star, a piano from an older woman at church, a piano teacher who lives next door, fuzzy socks, windows that open to the spring breeze, a lovely paragraph in Ted Kooser’s book on poetry, visits to a hometown where I can see the stars at night, hearing my daughter’s Big Bad Wolf voice as she learns to read Little Red Riding Hood, hearing my son pick out a harmony line to the 1970s song Magic of all things, the purple door in my bathroom, my $75 refrigerator.

My husband and I have spent many Saturday mornings—one of which was our first date—browsing garage sales. We have seen a refrigerator at a garage sale exactly once: the weekend after we moved into our current home and inherited a refrigerator that constantly sounded like it was making ice, even though it wasn’t equipped with an ice maker. The location of the garage sale? One block from our house. Some neighbors had remodeled their kitchen and were reselling their four-year-old fridge for $75. As a bonus, walking a refrigerator down the street turns out to be a great way to meet the rest of your neighbors.

Give Back

  

When you begin to see abundance around you, the desire to give back comes almost automatically. What is the purpose of those benefits if not to benefit someone else? International child sponsorship is not without controversy, but our family has chosen it as a way to support communities in other parts of the world from our home in Minnesota. The point is not how you give, but that you give in whatever way you can. You can always find reasons for tightfistedness—most of which reveal the desire to control the way a recipient uses what we give—but I believe it’s almost always better to err on the side of meeting the need in front of you. That might mean giving my gloves to a homeless man, shoveling a neighbor’s sidewalk when she’s recovering from a shoulder injury, inviting a woman with three items to move ahead of me in the checkout line, or sending a thank you card to someone I appreciate. I don’t do these things because they make me happy, but I’m happier having done them.

Ask for Help

Conversely, we’re all needy at some point. My personal wellbeing has depended on admitting my needs and asking for help, most significantly when I took a semester off college to seek treatment for bulimia. Because of that history, I chose a doctor with a mental health background when we moved to Minnesota. She’s one of the people I routinely ask for help.

Invest in Relationships

Of course, many of the people who help me are friends and family members, and I hope they would say I help them in return. Healthy relationships are well-established contributors to overall happiness, but they can be elusive. Making meaningful connections requires time, commitment, and (gulp) vulnerability. Even when you’re a supportive friend or devoted family member, there’s no guarantee the other person will meet you halfway. In the end, though, I think relationships are what life on earth is about, and it’s hard to imagine happiness without them.

Tend to the Soul

My beliefs about happiness, as well as my happiness itself, are linked to my thoughts about eternity and my place within it. I think of my soul as the eternal part of me, the part that connects me to all things mortal and divine. I tend to my soul by participating in a religious community, appreciating the natural world, praying, reading religious texts, and enjoying artistic interpretations of the human experience.

There are other things that promote happiness: physical health (represented by the food in my refrigerator and the YMCA schedule on the door), meaningful work/activities (the calendar on the side of the fridge), humor (several magnets that make me laugh). Just as I’ve unconsciously furnished my kitchen with these values, I’ve somewhat more intentionally taught them to my children. Their happiness is not my primary goal. I’m more concerned that they recognize and pursue their purpose and give more than they take. If doing these things sets them up for happiness—well, that makes me happy.

appliance - 1. a device or instrument designed to perform a specific function 2. the use or application of a technique