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

hung right above her shoulders, but she begged us to grow it long. “You can grow it long only if you promise to keep it brushed nicely and out of your face,” I threatened, repeating the words that untold millions of parents have uttered, to no avail. She promised, but of course, her hair constantly hung in her face.
    “Eliza, brush your hair, it’s all messy.”
    “Eliza, you’ve got the dreaded middle part, part your hair on the side.”
    “Eliza, get a ponytail holder or a barrette, you need to pull your hair back.”
    “Eliza, you can’t possibly tell me you’ve already brushed your hair.”
    This criticism was no fun for her and no fun for me. I wanted to change this pattern. So the next time I wanted to fret about her hair, I said, “Bring me a brush,” and I started to brush her hair—not fast and rough, as I sometimes did when I was impatient in the morning, but gently. “I love seeing your hair smooth and shiny,” I said. “Your hair looks beautiful.”
    Eliza looked a little surprised.
    The next time I tried the same thing. “Let me brush your hair,” I told her. “I love brushing your hair.”
    She didn’t get any better about keeping her hair tidy, but it didn’t bother me as much.

12
DECEMBER
    Boot Camp Perfect
    H APPINESS
    Boot Camp Perfect
     
    F or eleven months, I’d been piling on the resolutions, and for this last month of December, I wanted to try Boot Camp Perfect. I would follow all of my resolutions, all the time. I would aim to see nothing but gold stars glittering on my Resolutions Chart. This goal of perfection was daunting, because following my resolutions took a huge amount of mental discipline and self-control—not to mention, it took a lot of time.
    So, for the month, I tidied, I cleared, I organized, I turned off the light. I sang in the morning, I laughed out loud, I acknowledged people’s feelings, I left things unsaid. I blogged, I asked for help, I pushed myself, I showed up, Iwent off the path. I wrote in my one-sentence journal. I met with my writers’ strategy group and my children’s literature reading group. I listened to my hypnosis tape. I didn’t eat any fake food. I bought needful things.
    Of course, I also failed to do these things. As hard as I tried during Boot Camp Perfect, I still didn’t manage to keep all my resolutions. Resolutions! After all these months, I was still astonished at how effectively they worked to make me happy, whenever I did faithfully keep them. I thought often of the 1764 journal entry of Samuel Johnson, who, as an inveterate resolution maker and resolution breaker, is one of the patron saints of the process:
    I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving; having, from the earliest time almost that I can remember, been forming schemes of a better life. I have done nothing. The need of doing, therefore, is pressing, since the time of doing is short. O GOD, grant me to resolve aright, and to keep my resolutions.
    Did I have even one single perfect day during December? Nope. But I kept trying. One helpful consequence of my happiness project was that even when I had a bad day, it was a good bad day. If I was feeling blue, I’d run through my mood-boosting strategies: go to the gym, get some work done, keep myself from getting too hungry, cross a nagging task off my to-do list, connect with other people, spend some time having fun with my family. Sometimes nothing really worked, but the nice thing about trying to ameliorate a bad mood by taking those kinds of constructive steps was that even when a day was bad, it had bright spots, and I could look back on a good bad day with satisfaction.
    One development had given me a huge shot of encouragement: after I’d posted an offer to send people my Resolutions Chart in case they wanted to see a model as they formulated their own resolutions, I’d started to get e-mails from people describing their happiness projects. Several people had even started their own blogs to track them. I wasgratified to think that I’d convinced some readers to try the method and resolutions that had worked for me.
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    T hank you very much for sharing your Resolutions Chart. My husband and I are going to create a month of resolutions. I think the exercise will be both fun and a good bonding experience for us after an emotionally rocky few months. We haven’t sat down to do it yet (which is yet another symptom of how work keeps us from spending quality time together), just talked about doing it