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

computer screen—and they seemed strangely relevant in many circumstances.
    The personal koan I reflected on most often was a Spanish proverb quoted by Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.” I’d read that line years ago, and I often found myself turning it over in my mind. Much later, I’d discovered a reference in Henry David Thoreau’s Journal in which he echoed Johnson: “It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves…. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.”
    With time, I think I began to grasp the meaning of these two koans, which had profound implications for a happiness project. I was trudging up the stairs of the library when I thought, “She who would find the happiness of the Indies must carry the happiness of the Indies with her.” I couldn’t look outside myself for happiness. The secret wasn’t in the Indies or in Labrador but under my own roof; if I wanted to find happiness, I had to carry happiness with me.
    Ruminating on my koans didn’t bring me any closer to satori, thelasting enlightenment promised by Zen (at least not as far as I could tell), but it did ignite my imagination. Because koans forced me to challenge the usual, straightforward boxes of meaning, they pushed me to think about thinking. That in turn brought me the delicious intellectual happiness that comes from grappling with an expansive, difficult question.
    EXAMINE TRUE RULES.
    Part of the challenge of mindfulness was to keep myself from falling into mechanical thoughts and actions. Instead of walking through life on autopilot, I wanted to question the assumptions I made without noticing.
    My research into cognitive science led me to the concept of heuristics. Heuristics are mental rules of thumb, the quick, commonsense principles you apply to solve a problem or make a decision. For example, the recognition heuristic holds that if you’re faced with two objects and you recognize one and don’t recognize the other, you assume that the recognized one is of higher value. So if you’ve heard of Munich but you haven’t heard of Minden, you assume that Munich is the larger German city; if you’ve heard of Rice Krispies cereal but you haven’t heard of Wild Oats cereal, you assume that Rice Krispies is the more popular brand.
    Usually heuristics are helpful, but in some situations our cognitive instincts mislead us. Take the availability heuristic: people predict the likelihood of an event based on how easily they can come up with an example. This is often useful (is a tornado likely to hit Manhattan?), but sometimes a person’s judgment is skewed because the vividness of examples makes an event seem more likely than it actually is. A friend of mine, for example, is hypervigilant about not eating anything that might contain raw eggs. She practically went into hysterics when she found out that her mother-in-law had allowed her kids to eat raw cookie batter. Why? Because her aunt got salmonella twenty-five years ago. This same friend, by the way, never wears a seat belt.
    Although they might not fit precisely into the definition of “heuristics,” I had my own idiosyncratic collection of principles—which I called “True Rules”—for making decisions and setting priorities. My father often talks about “True Rules.” For example, when I started working after college, he said, “Remember, it’s one of the True Rules—if you’re willing to take the blame, people will give you responsibility.” I’ve applied my own True Rules to help me make decisions, mostly without quite realizing that I was using them. They flicker through my brain so quickly that I have to make a real effort to detect them, but I identified a handful of rules that I frequently use:
    My children are my most important priority.
    Get some exercise every day.
    Jamie is my top priority, in matters big or small.
    “Yes” comes right away; “no” never comes.
    Get some work done every day.
    Whenever possible, choose vegetables.
    I know as much as most people.
    I’m in a hurry.
    Try to attend any party or event to which I’m invited.
    My parents are almost always right.
    Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.
    If I’m not sure whether to include some text, cut it out.
    Never eat hors d’oeuvres, and never eat anything at a children’s