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

necessity rather than by choice. When my husband of 30 years died I realized that if I didn’t make an active, conscious effort to figure out how to be happy, it wasn’t going to happen. By this age, almosteveryone has given at least some thought to happiness and how to go about achieving it. But in coming to terms with life as it is now, I realized that I wasn’t even entirely certain what the hell happiness *was*.
    I think a real life-shaking catastrophe can provide insights into happiness that you couldn’t have any other way, but the more you know about what happiness really means for you before you come to that point, the better equipped you’ll be to handle it. By all means, work on understanding happiness NOW.
     
    I have had a difficult time these past few years and happiness was something I needed like water in a desert. I deliberately looked for EVERY LITTLE THING that might lift my mood, anything to get me through. One of the things I found was blogging. I practice yoga daily & meditate, which has provided great peace. I tend a vegetable garden, look after family & pets, cook and search for books I love to read. I make art and keep a journal. On sunny days, I think “great,” a good day to be outdoors and on grey days I think “great,” a good day to be indoors. It’s all in your attitude. I choose to be happy, in spite of whatever drama that is going on in my life.
     
    I was married a very long time and in all those years life revolved around my husband. Long story short, he dumped me, probably when things got too boring, dunno. I went into a depression for years. Why?? I had no life of my own, I didn’t have the first clue as to who I was or what I wanted. It really never occurred to me in all those years of marriage that I needed to have a little tiny place for me to have my own things going on in life. Before the catastrophe, not after! After was too late. I was waiting to die, but I didn’t die, God isn’t ready for what little there is of me yet. Now, I see that it’s like saving money, you can’t save for when you get laid off, after you get laid off; rather, you have to save while you have a job and the money is still coming in. Life is like that, you have to DO while you are able to think of what you want, what you like, what needs it will fill, how it will enhance your life, how it will help you to maintain you, so that you have some reserves when crunch time comes.
     
    For me, when things are going well, and I am happy, I don’t think about happiness too much. It’s when I start to become unhappy or depressed that I concentrate on it more and try to think of ways to improve it.
     
    I have been through 2 serious bouts of depression in the last 4 years and because I have experienced this in the past I am very aware of the warning signs and try to catch it before it gets too bad. I find that keeping busy, especially seeing other people, is very helpful. It can be tough, as sometimes the last thing you want to do is see people or do ANYTHING at all, but if you can force yourself, you will usually end up having a good time and feeling better for it. The other strategy that certainly works for me although, it can be difficult to implement, is to become aware of your interior monologue and start arguing with it if it gets too negative. When I feel down, then I’ll start thinking how useless I am, and pathetic and how nobody can really like me etc. etc. I find that determinedly interrupting these thoughts and forcing myself to think the opposite—or doing something that prevents thinking, like reading a book or watching a film, can really help avoid the downward spiral. (I admit mentally arguing with your thoughts can feel silly, but it does help!)
     
    Remembering that joy exists is tough when you’ve been traumatized. Joy is a big concept and utterly unbelievable when we are in the depths of catastrophe. But happiness…happiness is more accessible. We can be miserable and then find ourselves laughing, even if just for a few seconds. It reaffirms the will to live, and from there we can branch out. Happiness, and the belief we have in it, is the foundation for survival. As a survivor of life-threatening trauma, it’s been the small idea of happiness that propelled me toward the larger idea of joy that eventually freed me from complex-PTSD. And now here I am, happy daily and always striving for that joyful moment. It can be done! And your project—anyone’s happiness