I went wandering around the internet the other day and found this article — “Five Things Happy People Do.” It’s at the Oprah website, a place I never thought I’d find myself, but that’s the (sometimes wacky) beauty of the wide-webbed world… we end up so many unexpected places. In web as in life, no?
[Happy people] design their lives to bring in joy. — from “Five Things Happy People Do” by Gabrielle LeBlanc
I like this. And I like the notion (also in the article) of eudaimonia, that happiness is found in “flourishing,” in becoming “one’s most golden self.” Happiness as a process, not a state of being. I am learning more and more that I can be essentially eudaimonic — essentially still in process with happiness — at times when I am fiercely angry or sad or feeling kicked in the teeth. Like certain kinds of hope, this is a kind of happiness that I can get down with.
Apparently, many of us are thinking about happiness these days. We’re studying it and measuring it and trying to find the formula. I hope it works, because the happiness of the flourishing self is a Good Thing, and I would wish it for all of us. But I am not so much a scientist, and I do not have Five Pearls of Wisdom or the Secret Equation to offer you. I don’t even have an equation for myself.
Or maybe I do. Maybe I do. I have a deck, and iced tea in the refrigerator, and a book. So I think I will take 20 minutes away from my work to sit in the sun and be Kelley and give attention to a part of myself that often gets short shrift but is also essential for the flourishing of me — the part that is not so much about doing as it is about being.
I tend to think of process as a dynamic thing, a moving thing…(shakes head). My perspective can be so fucking limited. Sometime the heart of a process is in a stopping point, a stillness that is necessary if there is ever to be movement again.
Today my wish for all of us is that whatever else we may be — peaceful or angry or afraid or joyful, dreaming big dreams or picking up their pieces, nursing wounds or back in the battle, smiling in the rain or watching the elegant aerobatics of crows or eating our second-favorite flavor of ice cream because the first has run out — that underneath it all, the stillness and the motion, we know that we are daimons, becoming, becoming.
Thanks again for these bits of happiness. Hm… I’m debating between leaving a long comment or a short one. *sigh* Life’s full of choices.
From the LA Times “The science of happiness” true or false. Success brings happiness. False. I found that out when I took differential calculus in high school. Up until then, my grades had averaged 98%. I even scored a perfect SAT once. But I was lazy. I’d learned all my math and chemistry and stuff during junior high, so I basically sat in the back row and chewed bubblegum and read novels and comics throughout high school. Until I got to calculus. Calculus was new. And I hadn’t paid attention to any of the classes. So I flunked my first quiz. Not with 50% but an absolute zero. I didn’t even try to copy, I didn’t know how. And the world didn’t end. I was so happy I had to buy myself a Tori Amos CD to celebrate.
That little quiz ended up teaching me that it’s okay to walk out on anything that didn’t feel right. It doesn’t matter if it’s school or a prestigious career in whatever, if it’s a snotty neighborhood or a crappy relationship. And I get a kick out of watching the expressions on former high school classmates when we run into each other and I tell them that I paint houses for a living (sometimes I do that in the summer because it’s physically exhausting and intellectually relaxing). “But weren’t you going to study genetics at MIT?” Nah. *giggling as I type this*
Have you seen All About My Mother ? (Todo Sobre Mi Madre) “…daimons becoming, becoming” reminds me of Agrado’s monologue.
Yes. I like those Almodóvar characters. Sometimes you just want to hug them or have them hug you.
I woke up thinking about Agrado. The name, in Spanish, is very revealing. It means to please, to appeal. Mainly to others. It has a certain sense of embraced servitude. It is a name Agrado chose to sum up her attitude towards her body and her life. One of the dying meanings of the word is “gift”. I’ve never heard anyone use it in that sense. Mostly, it is employed as a verb, or to describe or wish for a state that is close to “being of your liking”.
Karina, I am stealing your “bold the name of the person you’re talking to” strategy from your blog, it’s much better than @.
Very funny about the house-painting. It can be tons of fun to confound people’s expectations. But on the deeper level, it’s also hard to keep having to make the choices: to tell the truth, to choose whether to explain or not, to have to assess again whether one has absorbed so much of the culture that one is vulnerable on some level to the weight of what other people think. Or maybe that’s just me 🙂
Lindsey, no I haven’t, but it’ll go on the list. Thanks!
Do I get 10 cents for every name you bold?
I think I must be broken. I especially enjoy the part where I get to pull the photo album out of my backpack and show them what I get to wear for work. It’s like one of those MasterCard commercials, “Ivy League university degree: $38,000 a year. Watching the expressions on your ex-classmates faces when you show them what you wear when you paint houses for $17 bucks an hour: priceless.” Hmm… Yeah, I’m broken in all the right places.
Karina, no. 🙂 Just 10 cents of goodwill.
Priceless is right. You’re not broken. You are what my Southern great-aunt would have called “a little devil.”
Will have to hear sometime about the Ivy League experience. I was heavily recruited by various IL schools (and the Naval Academy and West Point, !!!). And for reasons that I still don’t quite understand, I chose not to apply to any (even after 4 years of loving my New England prep school). The Harvard admissions office called me over Christmas break my senior year to offer me a lengthy application deadline extension, and heavy hints of a full financial ride… and I said no thanks and hung up the phone. I think my mom still hasn’t quite gotten over it (waves at mom).
The IL is scary. You have a good sense of direction. Well done, Kelley. 🙂 You are now in possession of a 10-cent-fee waiver. Please, go bold-happy with those names.
I feel for your mom, though, like I feel for my own parents. I think that’s when the paint-houses-for-a-living doesn’t feel 100% amusing anymore. Maybe more like 80%. I’m glad that my parents sort of get me now, but it wasn’t always that way. It took them almost fifteen years to make their peace with my choices vs. what they call my “potential”. Thank goodness for siblings who did follow the path of the perfect people and have prestigious jobs with the government, appear in newspapers on a regular basis, and may even eventually provide the grandchildren and tamagotchis to be ogled over at future Christmas dinners (waves at sister).