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

that you’ve achieved it. It’s something that you have to resolve to do every day, forever. Striving toward a goal provides the atmosphere of growth so important to happiness, but it can be easy to get discouraged if reaching the goal is more difficult than you expected. Also, what happens once you’ve reached your goal? Say you’ve run the marathon. What now—do you stop exercising? Do you set a new goal? With resolutions, the expectations are different. Each day I try to live up to my resolutions. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but every day is a clean slate and a fresh opportunity. I never expect to be done with my resolutions, so I don’t get discouraged when they stay challenging. Which they do.
    With each passing month, too, I realized the importance of my First Commandment, “Be Gretchen.” As great minds throughout the ages have pointed out, one of our most pressing concerns should be to discover the laws of our own nature. I had to build my happiness on the foundation of my character; I had to acknowledge what really made me happy, not what I wished made me happy. One of the biggest surprises of the happiness project was just how hard it was to know myself. I’d always been slightly exasperated by philosophers’ constant emphasis on what seemed to me to be a fairly obvious question, but in the end I realized that I would spend my whole life grappling with the question of how to “Be Gretchen.”
     
    It’s funny; only once it was December and my happiness project was drawing to a close did it occur to me to wonder why I’d had the urge to do my happiness project in the first place. Sure, I’d had a bus-ride epiphany about wanting to be happier, and it had been a relief and a thrill to step outof my ordinary life to contemplate transcendent matters—but what had motivated me to stick with it for the whole year?
    Jamie told me what he thought. “I think this happiness project is all about you trying to get more control over your life,” he said.
    Was that true?
    Perhaps. The feeling of control is an essential element of happiness—a better predictor of happiness than, say, income. Having a feeling of autonomy, of being able to choose what happens in your life or how you spend your time, is crucial. Identifying and following my resolutions had made me feel far more in control of my time, my body, my actions, my surroundings, and even my thoughts. Getting control of my life was definitely an aspect of my happiness project, and a greater feeling of control gave me a major boost in happiness.
    But something deeper was going on as well. I’d begun to understand that, although I hadn’t quite recognized it when I started, I was girding myself for some awesome, dreadful challenge, or working to meet some Judgment Day deadline for virtue. My Resolutions Chart is really my conscience. I wonder if one day I’ll look back on this year of my happiness project with wonder at my…innocence. “How easy it was to be happy, then, ” I might think on some dark, distant morning. How glad I’ll be that I did everything within my power to appreciate the life I have now, just as it is.
    The year is over, and I really am happier. After all my research, I found out what I knew all along: I could change my life without changing my life. When I made the effort to reach out for them, I found that the ruby slippers had been on my feet all along; the bluebird was singing outside my kitchen window.

AFTERWORD
    J amie joined the clinical trial for the hepatitis C drug VX-950. The bad news: the treatment proved ineffective for him. The good news: his liver continues to hold steady.
    My sister’s diabetes is under control.
    On the anniversary of my blog, I made a book of the year’s blog posts on Lulu.com.
    When my children’s literature reading group hit twenty members, we had to close the group to newcomers, and I started a second children’s literature group with more enthusiasts.
    I did two one-minute Internet movies: The Years Are Short (www.theyearsareshort.com) and Secrets of Adulthood (www.secretsofadulthood.com).
    In addition to Jamie and my mother-in-law, I also convinced my father-in-law and eight friends to join my weight-training gym.
    To “Show up,” “Make three new friends,” and “Be a treasure house of happy memories,” I volunteered to be one of two house parents for Eliza’s class at school.
    I contacted several people active in the field of organ donation and, after a long