Happiness: Don’t Forget to Enjoy Yours Today

(NOTE: This post is dedicated to Agnes F. Brown, who will retire on 9/30/19 after 20-plus years of work in public service. The lady is classic, mindful, and caring. I have no doubt she seeks—and finds—happiness each and every day. But Agnes is also an achiever, and I sense a frustration in her for not having an answer to a well-meaning question many have recently asked: “What’s next?” So I say this to you, Agnes, with respect and love: “Stop with all the achieving already! Take time to breathe. Regroup. Say ‘NO!’ And when asked ‘What’s next?’ maybe reply with a smile and a shrug. After all, isn’t taking time to enjoy our own happiness one of the biggest achievements of all?”) ​

​As a lad in school, the late John Lennon was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. Lennon wrote down, ‘Happy.’ “You don’t understand the assignment,” he was told. “No,” he countered, “you don’t understand life.” Whether the exchange between Lennon and a teacher really occurred as outlined above, who knows? I imagine it could have, and I smile at the thought of the bad boy Beatle saying such a roguish thing.

In the Midwestern protestant pocket of my youth, happiness wasn’t pursued. It came to us, so we were told, as a result of serving others with a joyful heart, turning the other cheek, and understanding that it is better to give than to receive. (Oh, yeah, that worked.)

The pursuit of happiness these days is less frowned upon, not perceived so much as self-centered and shallow as once upon a time. The pursuit of happiness is a US Constitutional right, after all. Maybe even a divine gift. For those reasons and more, people in this day and age are on a quest for what Lennon wanted to be sixty-plus years ago: Happy.

The most recent World Happiness Report, published in March 2019, ranked 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. And you know what? In this year’s report—the 12th ever produced by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network in partnership with the Ernesto Illy Foundation—the U.S. came in at #19.

Nineteen! That means the residents of 18 other countries in the world perceive themselves to be happier than those of us here in the U.S.

(A few writer’s notes here...just in case you’re wondering. Note1: The Scandinavian countries kicked some big-time booty with their high happiness rankings. Note2: Yes, I do take this report with a grain of salt. Note3: I still find it interesting.)

So what are some of the possible reasons so many of us see ourselves as less than happy? For starters, how about worsening health conditions, declining social trust, cynicism toward government, addiction, behavioral health issues...and don’t get me started on social media. (I mean, does your life ever look as rich and splendid and pulled together as the filtered goings-on of your Instagram friends?)

Because so many of us in the U.S. are unhappy, guess what? Happiness continues to be BIG BUSINESS. A recent search on Google for “happiness influencers” turned up a list of 7,142 individuals. Goodreads shares a list of 288 of the best happiness book titles. BOOK RIOT lists 100 must-read books about happiness.

It doesn’t stop with programs and books and blogs. A search for happiness products on the web produced items such as supplements, planners and journals, adult coloring books, essential oils, light therapy lamps, meditations, plants, luxurious bedsheets, sex toys, bath bombs and salts, self-improvement regimens...the list goes on.

Hey, who am I to complain about people making money trying to help others feel happier? I myself am guilty of feeding the happiness consumption craze. In fact, if I were more of an entrepreneur than an artsy fart, I might even try to monetize it myself. I mean, what’s wrong with that? As long as you’re doing it legally and ethically, of course.

For now, though, my words are coming to you at no cost and without a blast of citations regarding the science and evidence-based research behind them. (You get what you pay for, no?)

Contemplating my own level of happiness, I happen to believe what many psychologists say: Happiness is 50% determined by genetics. (You do the research on proving this true or false. I’m too busy damning my ancestors for an overdose of melancholy that made it into my gene pool and surfaces when least appropriate.)

That said, if each of us comes to this earth with our own predisposition toward happiness, are we each doomed to be a complete cackling hyena or serious Sol? I doubt that. But neither do we have to deny our underlying nature. Some of us are just more naturally joyful.

To an extent, we are what we are, right? And I’ve already confessed that I sometimes wear an unflattering shade of melancholy. But I’ve also mentioned finding a list of 7,142 individuals out there known as “happiness influencers”, remember? Well, I happen to follow one, Gretchen Rubin, who, with her sister Elizabeth Craft, hosts a free podcast called “Happier with Gretchen Rubin.” And now that I've shamelessly plugged them (for no reason other than simply choosing to do so), please allow me to share a happiness hack passed along by these sage sisters.

In late 2017, Gretchen and Elizabeth issued a challenge to their listeners. In lieu of the usual new-year’s resolutions so many of us make and break, they suggested we identify—and write down—18 things to accomplish during 2018 that would add to our level of happiness.

For some reason, I found the “Eighteen for ‘18” challenge appealing. In my mind, this shed a positive light (enhancing happiness) on a practice that had repeatedly delivered me negative results (failing at self-improvement). I appreciated the variety of the tasks—some ongoing, some one-time deals.

So how did I do? Well, remember, I’m someone who really hates to keep score! Yet in spite of that, I hung in through 2018, kept some and changed some up for 2019, and am contemplating a repeat once more in 2020. So perhaps that’s telling in itself?

Whatcha think?

If you find the challenge above silly, so be it. But if something about it appeals, why not consider making a short list for the remainder of 2019? Better yet, start mapping out your own “Twenty for ‘20” happiness goals for next year.

(Pssssst, Agnes, you can do this exercise again, but only if you’d like. And maybe ease up and don’t worry about making all your goals so SMART?)

Remember, all: Never chase happiness. Seek it. Find it. Relish it. And if you’re so inclined, drop me a line and let me know what it looks like to you.

Cheers! Jan

Confessions of a Book Slut

OMGahhhhhh! The 2019 AJC Decatur Book Festival is upon us, and I. AM. GIDDY. Why? Because I love, love, love books.

What kind of books, you ask?

Well..., I like fiction, especially thrillers but also tales that examine contemporary issues or stories that plop a fictional character into an historical event or time or place. Then again, I also enjoy nonfiction, including memoir, true crime, biography, humor, slice-of-life essays, books about writing, travel guides…. You probably get the gist. (Pictured below are some of the recent selections my book club has read.)

The simple truth? At the risk of offending some, I’m what you might call a book slut.

When it comes to books, I can’t seem to get enough. There’s almost always one or two lying in wait on my night stand. But then I’ll hear or read about another recommendation, and temptation will rear its head. I don’t mean to be so fickle, but the library’s minutes down the street, and there’s a bookstore just a bit further. Don’t even remind me of the immediacy of a Kindle purchase. I’m already sunk. You’ve heard of compulsion? Addiction and insatiability? Those words describe me when it comes to books.

As long as I’m already blushing, here are a few more personal admissions.

Confession #1: I suffer from something called bibliosmia. That is the affliction of loving the smell of old books. Only my bibliosmia doesn’t stop with the olfactory sense or with only old books. When it comes to books, I enjoy new ones, too. They can be hard-covered, paperback, geared toward children, oddly shaped or textured, filled with pictures, or plain as slate. There’s just something magical about books. (I found the book below at Target and couldn’t resist getting it for my granddaughter. Isn’t it great?)

Confession #2: The first chapter book I attempted to read was a Nancy Drew mystery that I checked out from the school library in first grade. Granted, for today’s first grader that may not be a huge accomplishment. Seems like today’s first graders are solving algebra problems and tackling 20-word spelling lists. But in my day, first-grade reading assignments evolved around Dick and Jane and their dog Spot, whom they liked to see run. I probably didn’t comprehend great chunks of that first Nancy Drew book, but know this: I carried it between school and home for days, I turned the pages one by one, I poured over the words as best I could, and I fell in love with the mystery genre. To this day. ​

Confession #3: I’ve never been a literature sophisticate. In high school, I used Cliffs Notes. A lot. My reading comprehension scores were decent enough, but somehow I didn’t always get what I was supposed to glean when reading a classic. Take Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway. As a young reader, I thought I knew what the man in the story meant when he recommended the girl have an operation that was “perfectly simple” and “not really an operation at all.” Still, I appreciated confirmation that I was reading about terminating a pregnancy. And I definitely needed help to infer that the white elephants of the title referred not only to cast-off items but to female fertility. Confession #4: I’m not very savvy about poetry either, but I try. My personal teenaged tastes leaned toward Rod McKuen and Susan Polis Schutz. High school and college classes brought on Dickinson, Yates, Stevenson, and Poe. Later still, I read the poetry of Ted Kooser, Rita Dove, and Joe Hutchison, and I started to get it. It may have been Hutchison’s poem, The Artichoke - “O heart weighed down by so many wings” – that convinced me. Confession #5: I love, love, love cookbooks. But I hate, hate, hate to cook. Go figure. ​ Confession #6: I’ve never met a book club I didn’t enjoy...although I think my current club (some of the members pictured below) is my favorite.

The Bad Girls Book Club meets every other month. We’re a melting pot of black, white, biracial, and Asian-Indian women, and our ages range from thirty to sixtysomething. I’m not always sure how I feel about a book I’ve finished until I have time to process it. That’s where the Bad Girls’ discussions come in. Our views will often differ, our voices may even grow loud, but that’s okay. Everyone gets their say about our books’ scenes and characters, outcomes that caught our breath, structure or phrases that appealed or appalled. The loudest voice doesn’t get the prize. All the Bad Girls win, as we continue to listen and learn. About ourselves. And, more importantly, about things much bigger than ourselves. (Below are some more of the books that we’ve been reading.)

Confession #7: Some of the younger Bad Girls have me enjoying something I never thought would be possible: audio books. I know: shut up! My struggle was real enough adapting to Kindle. Yet here we are. Audio books may not smell or feel like the real deal, but they fit in well with today’s busy-ness. While audio books don’t depict words on a page, they allow me to read on the road. With some headphones and an iPhone, I can now enjoy books while tending to house and laundry, prepping meals, weeding the garden, walking...exercising...closing my eyes to relax and listen. I admit, audio books have their upsides. One audio book I’ve enjoyed recently is An American Marriage (hardcover pictured below), narrated by Eisa Davis and Sean Crisden, whose voice is, dare I say, oh, so sensual?

Confession #8: Not only am I a book slut, I’m also a geek over most things bookstore- or author-related. One of my favorite possessions is my female authors umbrella (below left), purchased in the independent Eagle Eye Book Shop tent at the AJC Decatur Book Festival several years ago. And, at the risk of sounding like a stalker (which I’m not, really), I admit I hollered “Stop! Detour!” to Rice as our rental car neared a certain exit on Interstate 95 during our 2017 summer road trip. Yup, I’m one of those people who had to stop for pictures of what is reportedly Stephen King’s house in Bangor, Maine. If it’s not his house, it should be. Just check out that three-headed serpent on the fence post (pictured below right).

Confession #9: It’s a source of delight to me that my children and my grandchildren all seem to love books, too. (Below left, Britton started reading to Charli shortly after she was born in spring 2018.) I don’t take credit for it, but I do feel an extra surge of connection when the boy kicks it to the absolute next level to share his geek side over books (below right).

Confession #10: I’d love it if our paths crossed at the AJC Decatur Book Festival— https://www.decaturbookfestival.com/, Friday, August 30 through Sunday, September 1. It’s one of the largest independent book festivals in the country held each Labor Day weekend in downtown Decatur, Georgia. If you’re not able to make it this year, mark your calendar for another year down the road. It truly is an incredible event.

Take it from me, a self-professed and unabashed book slut.

Cheers…and happy reading! J

1,261,440,000 Seconds: Ode to a Great Institution

(This post is a "Happy Anniversary" nod to my sweet husband in celebration of our 40 years of marriage. Love you, Rice!) ​

​One billion two-hundred sixty-one million four-hundred-forty thousand seconds. Do you know what that represents? If you replied, “Forty years,” you’re correct. Even if your math skills only allowed you to murmur, “A freaking long time,” you’d still be correct. Believe me, I know, because it also happens to be the amount of time that I’ve been married. To the same man. For forty years. Forty. The number itself gives me pause. For some reason, I never thought I’d even live that many years. Who knows why? I just remember being plenty pleased when I hit the old 4-0. ​ Ah, sweet forty. You weave through our lives in ways that are sometimes profound. The Bible tells us that Jesus spent forty days fasting in the wilderness and the Jews wandered the desert for forty years. In Arabian Nights, Ali Baba took on forty thieves. Women endure forty weeks of pregnancy. Of course, forty can pass our way in less significant ways as well. Consider the forty-hour work week or the forty-space Monopoly board. And then consider this about forty-five:

Digressions aside, I never pictured myself surpassing the forty-year mark when it comes to any institution. Forty years breaks down to 146,000 days or 350,400 hours. It’s 21,024,000 minutes, or, for pity’s sake, over a third of a freakin’ century (0.3999, to be exact). That’s a looooong time, Toto. I never envisioned Rice and me reaching such a marital milestone.

It’s not that we take marriage lightly, although, admittedly, I’m more of a realist than a romantic. My own mom was married, and subsequently widowed, three times. Her longest marriage? Six years. The reality is, tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us.

“You don’t think there’s some kind of black widow’s curse that runs in the family?” Rice asked me that question shortly before we said our “I do’s.”

​He meant it to shed some levity. I think. In retrospect, it may indeed be levity—an ability to laugh together over the most mundane moments—that has been a cornerstone to getting us to the forty-year mark. God only knows if there’s actually a key to making a marriage work. That doesn’t stop people from spouting opinions, though. If you’d like a few giggles, take the quiz below and ponder who has said what about love and marriage through the years.

So, what d'ya think? Did your thoughts run more parallel to Margaret Atwood’s than you might like to admit? Or maybe you concurred with Julia Child? Bless her heart, and bless yours, too. ​ Fun and luck aside, experts tell us there really may be ways to increase our chances to stay happily married. Cornell researchers insist it requires honest conversations about money. Mental wellness counselor David Ezell recommends that we keep on dating. Certified counselor Jonathan Bennett touts the benefits of training for endurance events, like marathons or bike races, with a loved one. (Yowza. I’m pretty sure Rice and I are sunk if getting through Year 41 requires completing a couples’ triathlon.)

Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, believes that the key to marital bliss may be to make your relationship as boring as possible. He reasons that it’s not years of traveling on private jets and snapping photos of exotic locales that bind our coupledom. Rather, it’s being able to be boring together. Boring, as in sitting around, watching TV, cooking dinner, doing nothing, living with no huge drama. Does Manson need his head examined? I mean, c’mon, I love my memories of traveling with Rice through the years. I adore our photos of Sonoma and Europe, our walks through vineyards and ruins, our first tastes of a vibrant red blend or an exotic cuisine that’s new to us. Then again, some of my most loved memories with Rice do tend to focus on, well, being boring together. Like the time we got in the car and followed a map to a little corner store in Michigan because we wanted to travel to a town called Bliss. (That was the actual town of Bliss, that little corner.) Or does it get much better than sitting around the family room, watching our grands dance...or hanging out with them in the kitchen while we nuke some mac ‘n cheese? And what about those ultra-mundane moments, like when one of us snores so loudly it wakes us both up, and we get the giggles so badly the bed shakes, and, just when we think our moment of immaturity has passed, another wave of twitters leaves us gasping for breath through our tears. Now that I think of it, Mark Manson may not be crazy at that. Perhaps I’m ready to be institutionalized after all. When you ask me what one billion two-hundred sixty-one million four-hundred-forty thousand seconds of marriage feels like, maybe I’ll tell you, “A freaking long time.” But possibly, quite probably, I’ll add this: ​ “It feels like a pretty damned good start!”

Cheers! Jan