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I do love January: The weather is dicey, the days still too short, but new projects abound.
This is the year we are going to detox, get in shape, meditate, save the world--or at least ourselves
This is the year we are going to write the book, dust off the old canvases and make time for painting, start the rebuilding project.
The days will get longer--this much is certain.
My classes fill up. Twelve fresh faces ready to start something new.
When I read the top ten tips to lose weight, top ten to get happy, top ten to make more money, I go back to one of my favorite books: A Life of One's Own by Marion Milner: What if we set out to doubt everything we have been taught? To rebuild our knowledge not in a structure of logic and argument, not from reason, but from our senses?
There aren't any hard and fast rules when it comes to starting the happiness journal. The idea and the method is fairly simple:
The method was (a) to pick out those moments in my daily life which had been particularly happy and try to record them in words. (b) To go over these records in order to see whether I could discover any rules about the conditions in which happiness occurred.
--Marion Milner, 1934
And so it is that you record, each day, when it was that you were happy. You begin to track your joy the way you once learned to balance your checkbook. You discover your own top ten.
If you saw happiness as "the ultimate currency," as Harvard happiness professor Tal Ben Shahar calls it, how would you spend your hours?
Most of our days are built, at least to some extent, around money. How we make it, how we spend it. "But I need money!" you'll resist. "What do you want me to do? Quit my job for some fleeting happiness?!"
Of course not, dear.
Well, maybe.
But more likely the shifts will be subtler. The cool thing about the happiness journal is that it doesn't ask you to change anything. Just to notice and record. Sure, the practice is designed to change you, but you don't have to force any change.
As for the method which led to me these discoveries, let no one think it is an easy way because it is concerned with moments of happiness rather than with stern duty or high moral endeavor. For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one's eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one's wants ready-made from other people, and to evade the continual day-to-day sifting of values. And finally, let no one undertake such an experiment who is not prepared to find himself more a fool than her thought.
--Marion Milner, 1934
Tell me what you find.
