The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Othello, To Kill a Mockingbird,Atonement, A Passage to India, Burmese Days, Crime and Punishment, or Arthur and George if I could avoid it—and that was okay.
    FORGET ABOUT RESULTS.
    As I read, I love to take notes—often for no apparent reason. I’m always marking up books, making odd lists, gathering examples in strange categories, copying passages. For some reason, I like working on some permanent, undefined research project. I feel compelled to make lists of foreign words that describe concepts that English can’t convey ( flâneur, darshan, eudaimonia , Ruinensehnsucht , amae, nostalgie de la boue ), explanations of concepts that I find queerly charged with significance (the Fisher King, the westerly road, Croatoan, Eleusinian Mysteries, offering of first-fruits, the hunting of the wren, the Corn-Spirit, sparagmos, the Lord of Misrule, cargo cult, Greek herm, potlatch, the Golden Ratio), and hundreds of other topics.
    Note taking takes a lot of time and energy, and I used to discourage this impulse in myself. It seemed pointless and self-indulgent. But following this month’s resolutions and my First Commandment to “Be Gretchen,” I allowed myself to “Forget about results” and take notes guilt-free.
    Perversely, it was only once I said to myself, “Okay, Gretchen, take all the notes you want, it doesn’t matter why,” that it occurred to me how useful these notes had been. My first book, Power Money Fame Sex, grew out of a huge body of notes. When I had a chance to write my book Profane Waste, about the question of why people would choose to destroy their possessions, I was able to pack the book with startling, apt examples because I’d been taking notes (for no discernible reason) for years. Because note taking didn’t look like “real work” to me, it didn’t register as valuable—even though it was.
    One thing that makes a passion enjoyable is that you don’t have to worry about results. You can strive for triumph, or you can potter around, tinker, explore, without worrying about efficiency or outcomes. Otherpeople may wonder why you’ve been happy to work on the same old car for years, even though it’s still not running, but that doesn’t matter to you. An atmosphere of growth brings great happiness, but at the same time, happiness sometimes also comes when you’re free from the pressure to see much growth. That’s not surprising; often, the opposite of a great truth is also true.
    MASTER A NEW TECHNOLOGY.
    To me, making books sounded like fun. As a child, I’d spent countless hours working on my Blank Books. I’d written two horrible novels before I became a professional writer. Throughout my life, I’d made minibook projects as gifts for my family and friends. When I thought about the projects that I’d loved doing with Eliza, they all involved making books.
    For example, she and I made a book using some of her bright, elaborate drawings. She dictated a caption for each picture while I typed; then we cut out the captions, taped them on the pictures, made color copies, and had the copies spiral-bound into a book. It was a fun project to work on, made a wonderful keepsake, supplied a Christmas/Hanukkah gift for the grandparents, captured a moment in Eliza’s development, and allowed me to throw away the enormous stacks of pictures without a smidgen of guilt. (However, I will admit that when I wrote about this project on my blog, one reader was shocked: “I can’t believe you actually threw out the originals of your daughter’s drawings. I would have made the copies, as you did, but bound the originals into a scrapbook of sorts. The originals can NEVER be duplicated. I must confess to actually gasping when I read this.”)
    Recently I’d been intrigued to read about a self-publishing site, Lulu.com. According to the Web site, I could print a proper hardback book, complete with dust jacket, for less than thirty dollars. I mentioned this to Jamie, and he snorted, “What would anyone use that for?”
    “You mean, who has book-length documents lying around that they’d like to print in book form?” I asked.
    “Right.”
    “Are you kidding? Me! ” I said. “If this works, I’ll print up a dozen.” At last, something to do with all those notes I’d been taking without a purpose. For the trial run, I made a book out of the journal I’d kept for the first eighteen months of Eliza’s life (another book I’d written without really noticing it). I sat down at the