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

kept reminding myself, is the time to keep my resolutions. Because the telephone is going to ring again.

9
SEPTEMBER
    Pursue a Passion
    B OOKS
    Write a novel.
    Make time.
    Forget about results.
    Master a new technology.
     
    R eturning from vacation made me appreciate my beloved library anew. This library, just one block from my apartment, is perfect: a beautiful building, open stacks, Internet access, a terrific children’s section, and a quiet study room in which to do my writing—and boy, is that room quiet. I still remember the glares I got one morning when I forgot to mute the start-up tones on my laptop. It was easy to take the library for granted—I’d been going there several times a week for seven years—but my brief absence reminded me how much I loved it (thus proving the advice of happiness experts, who advocate periods of deprivation to sharpen pleasures).
    Given my happiness to be back at the library—and also September’s association with the beginning of the school year—it was appropriate that this month revolve around books. My chief resolution for the month was to “Pursue a passion,” which in my case meant everything related to books. I love reading and writing, and my work centers on reading and writing, yet these activities still get crowded out of my time.
    Long ago, I read the writer Dorothea Brande’s warning that writers are too inclined to spend their time on wordy occupations like reading, talking, and watching TV, movies, and plays. Instead, she suggested, writers should recharge themselves with language-free occupations like listening to music, visiting museums, playing solitaire, or taking long walks alone. That made sense to me, and I’d sporadically tried to follow that advice. But during the period when I was preparing for my happiness project, while browsing in a bookstore, I had a glaringly obvious realization: for better or worse, what I loved to do was to read, to write, and to make books—really, if I was honest, to the exclusion of practically any other activity.
    A while back, a friend with three children mentioned to me, “On the weekends, I like a day when we all spend at least two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon playing outside.”
    “On the weekends,” I answered, “I like a day when we all lie around reading in our pajamas until after lunch.” True—but I felt bad about it. Why? Why did I think her inclinations were superior? Why do I feel guilty for lying around, “just reading”? Probably because that’s what comes most naturally to me. I wish I were different, that I had a wider range of interests. But I don’t. Now, though, it was time to be more thoughtful about pursuing my passion for reading and writing. To me, that sounded like a lot more fun than playing outside. (Of course, until Eleanor was older, mornings spent reading would be pure fantasy, but we’d had them before, and we’d have them again.)
    To keep this month’s resolution to “Pursue a passion,” I first had to recognize my passion. Done. My next step was to make time for it, to find ways to integrate my passion into my ordinary days, and to stop measuringmyself against some irrelevant standard of efficiency. I also wanted to learn to master some of the new technology that makes bookmaking easy.
    Not everyone shares my particular passion, of course; instead of books, it might be college football, or community theater, or politics, or garage sales. But whatever your passion might be, happiness research predicts that making time for a passion and treating it as a real priority instead of an “extra” to be fitted in at a free moment (which many people practically never have) will bring a tremendous happiness boost.
    One thing I learned from my blog, however, was that some people feel overwhelmed by the question “What’s your passion?” It seems so large and unanswerable that they feel paralyzed. If so, a useful clue to finding a passion to pursue, whether for work or play, is to “ Do what you do. ” What you enjoyed doing as a ten-year-old, or choose to do on a free Saturday afternoon, is a strong indication of your passion. (One blog reader pointed to an even more basic indicator: “Actually very similar to advice from a physics professor of mine, who said, ‘What do you think about when you’re sitting on the toilet? Because that’s what you *want* to think about.’”) “Do what you do” is helpful because it points you to examining your