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

was insanely unhappy. Now I’m following the artistic path, am flat broke, worry about money nearly all the time, but am insanely happy (except when I get the moments of wishing I could make life easier for myself and follow the crowd).
     
    It’s so true…and I do think about those things sometimes, especially as I’m getting older. There are no “do overs” and some things just aren’t going to happen. It does make me a little sad sometimes. I just have to embrace what is.:)
     
    I relate to what you say here, more than I’d like to admit. I’d like to be this really cool, easygoing person who gets along with everyone, but that isn’t me—not really. I don’t feel comfortable in strange situations and I get more uptight about things than I like, and I make friends slowly.I WANT to be different and am pretty good at pretending, but it can be hard to deny that inside I am shy. In the same way, I’d like my husband to change, sometimes, and I have to remind myself that is unfair and unrealistic. Plus I love him, just the way he is.
     
    I actually lost a friendship because I couldn’t tell the difference between what I sometimes wished I was and what I was actually willing to become. I always had a touch of envy for those women who go out, in grand style, enjoying their cosmopolitans and discussing high fashion. I had a friend, however, who actually became that, and decided she was no longer interested in me because I didn’t become that person. I wonder to this day if I am partially to blame for that, as I probably led her to believe that I was willing to go in that direction.
    But the thing is…when given the choice, I’d much rather stay home. I’m such a homebody, and I really don’t enjoy crowds, bars, or getting all dolled up, to be honest. Thanks for this post…it makes me realize that perhaps I can learn to be ok with being me…just as I am.
     
    Ah, the constant tug between striving and accepting. I’ve never figured this out, except to say that it seems like a balance of necessary opposites. And yes it can be sad, while being busy and running out and fulfilling all things on my dreams/desires list I am not just accepting myself as is and letting me be me as is. I’m pushing myself. And yet if I don’t push myself I find I can be dissatisfied with things about me and my life. I figure there is a time for both pursuing and accepting.
     
    For me, I always wanted to start my own business. I pursued the idea of “being a businessman.” However, whenever I tried to do things I thought businessmen “should” do, I would not be really happy. I would read certain magazines or do different things. Instead I try and make no plan on how to be a businessman and just do what sounds interesting, appealing, or “feels” like the right next step. I find I am still trending in a direction towards starting my own tech business but in a different way than I thought I should and it feels great at every step. Looking back, I feel the things I “should” have done were not the things that brought me towards my goal anyway and were taking me away from it (and wasting a ton of time).
    You also mention the idea of regret for not appreciating something that you think must have some beauty, which you cannot see. I understand this as well, but maybe instead of focusing your mind on this, you look at those things that do have a beauty to you now and look at them more and more. Everything has its own beauty. Some appeal to us more than others.
     
    Our lives are in the space between Isaiah Berlin’s “We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail an irreparable loss” and Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, where every choice produces a quantum explosion of alternate futures. Ich bin ein Berliner for the most part, have a hard time seeing past the irreparable losses.
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    Seeing this response was comforting. I realized that just as clearing away my nostalgic clutter and my aspirational clutter in January had opened up more space for the possessions I really use in the present, relinquishing my fantasies of what I wished I found fun allowed me more room to do the things that I did find fun. Why worry about jazz clubs when I really wanted to design my own Book of Hours? Be Gretchen.
    TAKE TIME TO BE SILLY.
    Preoccupied with my work, distracted by my running mental to-do lists, I’d become more humorless than I used to be. Many of my resolutions were aimed at gaining control of my temper, but that