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

a priest, an apostle, a doctor of the Church, a martyr…I should like to die on the battlefields in defence of the Church,” she didn’t perform outstanding feats or undertake daring adventures; indeed, except for her trip to petition the pope, she stayed in her neighborhood and with her immediate family for her whole life. She wanted to suffer and to spill her blood for Jesus, and she did, but in a little way—not in a glorious confrontation in war or at the stake but by dying in agony, spitting up blood, as a pitiful tuberculosis victim.
    As Pope Pius XI emphasized in the Bull of Canonization, Thérèse achieved heroic virtue “without going beyond the common order of things.” (Reading about Thérèse taught me a lot about Bulls of Canonization and all the mechanics of saint making.) I couldn’t aspire to Thérèse’s saintliness, but I could follow her by aspiring to perfection within the common order of my day. We expect heroic virtue to look flashy—moving to Uganda to work with AIDS victims, perhaps, or documenting the plight of homeless people in Detroit. Thérèse’s example shows that ordinary life, too, is full of opportunities for worthy, if inconspicuous, virtue.
    One of my favorite examples: Thérèse intensely disliked one of her fellow nuns, Teresa of Saint Augustine, whom Thérèse described, without identifying her, as “a Sister who has the faculty of displeasing me in everything, in her ways, her words, her character.” Instead of avoiding her, Thérèse sought out this nun at every turn and treated her “as if I loved her best of all”—so successfully that this sister once asked Thérèse, “Would you tell me…what attracts you so much toward me; every time you look at me, I see your smile?”
    After Thérèse’s death, when this disagreeable nun gave her testimony during the process of Thérèse’s beatification, she said smugly, “At least I can say this much for myself: during her life I made her really happy.” Teresa of Saint Augustine never knew that she was the unlikable sister mentioned in Story of a Soul until thirty years later, when the chaplain, in a fit of exasperation, told her the truth. It’s a little thing, of course, but anyone who has ever suffered from a whiny coworker, a narcissistic roommate, or interfering in-laws can appreciate the heavenly virtue that befriending such a person would require.
    Because of my happiness research, one of the passages in Story of a Soul that most struck me was Thérèse’s observation that “for the love of God and my Sisters (so charitable toward me) I take care to appear happy and especially to be so. ” Thérèse succeeded so well at seeming effortlessly happy, and her laughter came so easily, that many of her fellow nuns didn’t recognize her virtue. One sister said, “Sister Thérèse gets no merit for practicing virtue; she has never had to struggle for it.” Near the end of Thérèse’s life, another sister observed that Thérèse made visitors to the infirmary laugh so much that “I believe she will die laughing, she is so happy”—at a time when Thérèse was in both secret spiritual torment and excruciating physical pain.
    Buddhists talk about “skillful” and “unskillful” emotions, and this has the right connotation of effort and competence. People assume that a person who acts happy must feel happy, but although it’s in the very nature of happiness to seem effortless and spontaneous, it often takes great skill.
    I set out to imitate Thérèse by doing a better job of acting happy when I knew that my happiness would make someone else happy. I didn’t want to be fake, but I could make an effort to be less critical. I could look for ways to be honestly enthusiastic—about foods that weren’t necessarily my favorite things to eat, activities that weren’t my first choice, or movies, books, and performances with which I could find fault. Usually I could find something to praise.
    Also, I saw that I needed to make a bigger show of my happiness. For example, when my Kennedy biography came out, various family members asked questions that, in retrospect, I realize were meant to elicit responses from me such as “I’m so thrilled! It’s so exciting to see it on the shelves! Everything is going great! I’m so happy!” But I have a perfectionist, dissatisfied, fretful, worrying nature, and I’m not easily thrilled. Looking back, I realize that the loving thing to do would have been to act happy