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

group, could I do for fun? I was stumped. Was I so cheerless and dull that I couldn’t think of a single other thing?
    One thing that’s both good and bad about living in New York City is the sense that I could be doing so much—going to the ballet, going to an off-off-Broadway play, taking a graphic design class, shopping in Williamsburg, eating in Astoria. But I almost never do those things, so the possibilities are exciting, but also a reproach. I’ve been haunted for years by a public ser vice poster I saw just one time, in the subway. It was a photo of a Chinese food take-out container sitting on top of two videos. The caption read, “If this is how you spend your time, why are you living in New York?”
    Fun abounded in New York City, if only I had the largeness of spirit to tap into it.
    I told a friend that I was trying to have more fun, and instead of pointing me toward the “Goings On About Town” column in The New Yorker, she asked me a question: “What did you like to do when you were a child? What you enjoyed as a ten-year-old is probably something you’d enjoy now.”
    That was an intriguing idea. I remembered that Carl Jung, when he was thirty-eight years old, had decided to start playing with buildingblocks again, to tap into the enthusiasm he’d felt as an eleven-year-old. What had I done for fun as a child? No chess, no ice-skating, no painting. I worked on my “Blank Books.” For my tenth birthday, my uncle had given me a book that looked like an ordinary book but with blank pages, titled Blank Book . Now such books can be bought anywhere, but when I got this one, I’d never seen anything like it. Before long, I’d bought several more.
    I turned my Blank Books into commonplace books filled with clippings, memorabilia, notes from school friends, cartoons, lists, snatches of information that interested me. Jokes cut from my grandparents’ back copies of Reader’s Digest sometimes found their way in. A special series of my Blank Books were illustrated books of quotations. Every time I read a quotation I liked, I’d write it on a slip of paper, and when I saw a picture in a magazine that I liked, I’d cut it out, and I created my books by matching the quotations to the pictures.
    Keeping up with my Blank Books was the main leisure activity of my childhood. Every day after school, I sat on the floor sorting, cutting, matching, copying, and pasting while I watched TV.
    I set off to replicate this experience. I was eager to give it a try, plus I’d thought of another potential benefit: I’d noticed that many of the most creative people are inveterate keepers of scrapbooks, inspiration boards, or other magpie creations. Twyla Tharp, for example, dedicates a file box to every project she begins, and as she works on the dance, she fills the box with the material that inspired her. Having some kind of physical way of preserving information keeps good ideas vivid and creates unexpected juxtapositions.
    I bought a huge scrapbook and started looking for items to include. A motley assortment emerged: a portrait of Princess Diana made of tiny photographs of flowers; a review from The New York Review of Books about Books of Hours; a photograph of an artwork by Portia Munson called Pink Project (1994), made of a table covered by pink objects; a map of the counties of England, which I wished I’d had when I was writing my Churchill biography; one playing card from the pack I took from my grandparents’house after they both died, decorated with a Thomas Kinkade–like picture of a water mill.
    Working on my new Blank Book made me look at magazines and newspapers in a different way. If something caught my attention, I’d think, “Why am I looking at this for a second time? Is it worth keeping for my Blank Book?” I was a less passive recipient of information. I also liked the process of cutting, placing, and pasting, so familiar from my childhood.
    All this thinking about fun made me realize that I had to make time for it. Too often, I’d give up fun in order to work. I often felt so overwhelmed by tasks that I’d think, “The most fun would be to cross some items off my to-do list. I’d feel so much better if I could get something accomplished.” I felt virtuous when I delayed gluing pictures into my scrapbook in order to deal with my e-mail.
    In fact, though, turning from one chore to another just made me feel trapped and drained. When I took the time to do something that was truly fun