Are You Happy Now?

"I imagine many passive-aggressive Minnesotans locking themselves in a garage and turning on the push mower or downing a whole bottle of Flinstone's brand vitamins as accounting for low suicide rates. Iowa's ranking is easy to understand. We look around at our neighboring states and thank the good lord we aren't them. We get our attention every four years and in the meantime we just plow our fields. It's a happy formula."
»» A comment submitted by kevin at 11:08 AM on November 29, MNSPEAK

Happy is as happy does?

I mentioned last week that I was doing my version of the Happiness study, the one where researchers asked women to write down all the activities in one day and then afterwards note the ones that made them happy. It seems to be part of this whole movement to a new "Positive Psychology." Why did I do this? I don't know. As I said, I've been thinking a lot about happiness lately. And sometimes I'm not that honest with myself. I can go to happy places (Farmer's Market) and be with happy people (my old neighbor Kathy) and read happy books (Me Talk Pretty One Day). And then when people ask me if I'm happy I say I am. But I'm not sometimes. I wanted to check out a slice of my everyday life and gauge how this life makes me feel.

It just so happens that the Star Tribune published an article today on happiness--my timing is perfect. In it they reveal that Minnesota ranks #6, below Iowa at #4, as the state "least depressed." Another MNSPEAK commenter writes in response to the Strib article:

"This ain't quality of life. It's just a least depressed/suicidal scale put out by the Mental Health Association. So we kill ourselves less frequently than Utahns [sic], but more frequently than Idahoans. That might just mean we're more stoic, not more happy. I call foul on the article's misleading headline."
»» Submitted by Jared at 9:35 AM on November 29, MNSPeak

I won't bore you with the full listing of my daily doings but allow me to let you in on a few insights. I've deliberately left out the interactions with my loved ones; the items below are more generic I guess and might give you a chance to think about some of your own.

"Make chai in go-cup at home, drink it on way to work while listening to The Current." You would not believe how much this makes me happy. Two things I think about: my dad always loved starting his day. My mom hated starting the day but loved putting her day to rest. I thought I was more like my mom on this one but I really do love me a new day. Also, if I weren't married, sexually active, and a mother of two, (and, of course, a woman. . . *and, oh yeah, Catholic) I could imagine myself as a Catholic priest. I love the rituals: waving the incense, lighting the candles, bowing before the Eucharist. Repeated bodily movements and voiced chants make me calm and clear. Boiling my water, measuring my tea, steeping the leaves, stirring in the sugar, and closing the cap on all that goodness: this I love. "The Morning Show" with Dale and Jim is as close as I get to morning chants.


"Starting up my computer and getting morning phone calls." This is my office. It's luxurious, as far as company offices go. I should say, it has a door. I like coming in to work in the morning. One thing that happened on this Wednesday that made me happy was a phone call from a perfect stranger. I had asked him to endorse a new book we're about to publish. This Southern man told me all about his old girlfriend who now lives in St. Paul and he asked me if I might know her. And then he seemed embarassed by his question--of course I wouldn't know her. . . . It had been almost 30 years since HE had seen her; still he always wondered about her--so to change the subject he asked me if I was a Cheesehead, just like that. It made me laugh out loud. I told him I did like Brett Favre, especially this year when he's hotter than George Clooney on a motorcycle.

Like a lot of people, I get a lot of joy talking to strangers. Is it the serendipity of it all? From small talk of time and place to girlfriends and quarterbacks and the realization that we all have some kind of common ground. Now some people feel full up with the talk of strangers; it only makes them more lonely. What they'd rather is a life of solitude--less people, less noise. Thomas McGuane, in a brilliant NYTimes book review of Per Petterson's novel, "Out Stealing Horses," writes: "We imagine we’ve seen this: Trond Sander, an Oslo professional who has recently lost his wife and sister, hopes to cure his loneliness by a plunge into solitude; nothing dramatic, he wants to pension out and make a few changes. Scandinavians differentiate between loneliness and solitude as a matter of course."

But even Trond, the stoic Scandinavian protagonist, finds it hard to sustain happiness--or even contentment--in his solitude. McGuane quotes from the book: “'The feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old," and then McGuane writes, "Like many an older man at loose ends, Trond flings himself into various do-it-yourself homeowner schemes whose quotidian nature barely masks the eeriness of his life and memories."

In a long and insightful article in New York Magazine, "The Dark Side of Happiness," the author writes, "No longer should we think of ourselves as tin cans of sexual chaos, as echoing caverns of repressed wishes and violent desires; rather, we should think of ourselves as the shining sum of our strengths and virtues, forceful, masters of our fates. All that nattering we’ve been doing in therapists’ armchairs, trying to know and exorcise our darker selves—it’s been misguided. It’s our better selves we want to know."

The sum of my strength often involves work. Does work make me happy? Does it make you happy? This is my daily view. We all try to dress up our work spaces and I've done the same. Photos of the family, good or silly fortune cookie fortunes, ticket stubs, cool postcards. But the view I really want is like the one I had at the Linda Hogan writing shed up at Norcroft, on the shores of Lake Superior. I looked out onto the woods--birch and sumac and sparrows and chipmunks and even, once in awhile for good fortune, a grazing doe. This windowless view doesn't make me happy but the work often does. Competence makes me happy. My own, that is.




But I did note that this view--the one of my office hallway--seriously does NOT make me happy. It is stark and dreary and the only sounds are the mechanical rushing of papers through the shared printers. I work in an office of introverts so for many hours in a day that is all I hear out in that hallway, and some days I feel trapped and buggy by it all, especially after lunch, "the noontime demon." Looking down this hallway, I crave the outdoors.

Happiness is elusive and though I believe in the power of the smile, the hearty cheer, the brisk walk, I also believe in the truth of the emotion. Happiness is like sex or sleep; you can't force it to happen or make it be blessedly good. In fact, that will only make things worse. Sometimes you just have to wait it out.

I was cold coming home that night of my survey and, on the advice of my colleague, I wrapped the wool car blanket around my hips and legs on the drive home. If that's not enough to make me sad I don't know what is. I say I like winter but the truth is there is nothing worse than driving home in a frigid car while wearing a work skirt and pantyhose. And while the blanket wrap warmed me up, it made me feel like a frail Jessica Tandy in "Cocoon."


When I got home I didn't feel the need to shore myself up with a lot of chatter or to bundle up and get my endorphins flowing with a fast walk in the neighborhood. That WOULD be forcing it! So I made a fire and turned on the oven for some late afternoon baking. And while I waited, I laid down and took a nap by the fire. These small measures are easy to throw myself into--and the pay-off doesn't have to be happiness. It can be just a little nook of contentment, a little shelter from the cold.