The first is a picture of something I’ve been working on since January; namely, the idea of sovereignty.  The idea is a work in progress, and the map is one of many spanning that progress.  I am posting it for Nathalie and Jaunita, who are right there with me when I need them.

The second is a picture of change.  Once upon a time I was the girl who could not walk across campus without tensing every muscle for fear people were looking at her.  The girl who would blush and stammer rather than hold a conversation.  The very queen of awkwardness, the non-phone-answerer, the one who declined every invitation.  Twenty years on, I am the woman who will pounce upon a friendly looking stranger with a ‘hi, I’m an enormous introvert; pleased to meet you!’  How did this happen you ask?  Still trying to work that one out, and I am posting this map for a dear friend who is on the journey too.

Pictures make me feel less mopey about the ten half-finished blog posts in my notebook. Let’s all forget about those posts and enjoy the shiny.  Or else.

Looking backwards for a moment, there are posts from that time on my old LiveJournal with tags like <a href=http://flyingblogspot.livejournal.com/?tag=my%20happiness%20project>my happiness project</a> and <a href=http://flyingblogspot.livejournal.com/tag/lifehacking>lifehacking</a>, arbitrary words for a much bigger thing, and recording fragments of a journey.   On that journey, I got somewhere; some great distance from the place where I had been before. It started to feel like it was somewhere I could stay forever.  And then moving out, immeasurable sadness, innumerable boxes, and constantly fighting everything down on every front.

The thing I regret the most over the last couple of years is not having had the capacity to hang onto tight the gentle, kind love for myself that I’d been carefully cultivating.  Finding that it was possible to actually <i>like</I> myself was – for various historical and then-current reasons – a great, unfolding knowledge and a completely new expereince.  It is utterly unacceptable to live in such a manner that when I look hard at myself, I sigh.

Somewhat unexpectedly over the past few weeks, the spark that triggered my first headlong crash into really, truly learning to be okay has been reignited.  I’m thinking about well-being, looking again at my mechanisms of self-sabotage, starting to clear out all the clutter – mental and physical – that has accumulated in every corner of my life.   Looking at being a woman who does something more than just hang on, just cope, just hoard every little bit of energy and sanity to be able to get up, go to work, and do it sufficiently well.

I’m waking the hell up and crashing back into it, in the passionate, enthusiastic way I crash into things when I’m  very excited.  I’m reading, re-reading, thinking, planning and considering two years’ worth of swirling chaos dissolve in the face of one little step after another.

And I’m going to write about it a little, because sometimes the best thing of all is remembering that you’re not the only one on the road.

When I came bouncing back through my gate, I checked the post and there was a letter there, addressed to me in my handwriting, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. I’d forgotten that I spent last year helping conduct a mentoring program with some super awesome teenagers, and on the last day we all – mentors and kids – wrote ourselves a letter to be delivered in one year’s time.

I feel a little shy sharing it here, because at the time I never shared it with anyone.  But I want to, and so this is my letter:

My dear,

I want 2010 to be a better year for you, and I promise to do my best to achieve that.

I want to see food growing in your garden, friends dining at your table, and love and forgiveness in your heart.

I want – no, I need – to know that you have actively worked on your mental health and made progress in conquering your anxiety.

I need you to live a year that you will look back upon with respect and peace in the years to come.

Take care, be strong, learn (and re-learn) to ask for help from those who love you, and never, ever stop dreaming, loving, learning and creating.

All my love.

I am surprised (in all my deadly perfectionist glory!) by just how much I have lived up to hopes and expectations of Last Year’s Me; I trust she’d be proud.

Looking through my bookmarks, it turns out that over the past few months I’ve hoarded quite a number of interesting articles on life, happiness and well-being.  In March, Scott Berkun wrote something that really challenges me to read, dealing as it does with being unbusy, being still and cultivating time.  It’s called The Cult of Busy.

Last month Dave Navarro (no relation) from Rock Your Day posted How To Stop Telling Your Sad, Sad Story, which I really loved; it’s such an ass-kicking.

Over at Fora.tv, you can watch Is The Pursuit of Happiness Making Us Miserable (which is probably is, if we take ‘happiness’ to mean hedonic pleasure).

Tim Ferris has written an epic piece on vagabonding, simplicity, travel and well-being.

Everyone’s been writing about Stuff versus Experience this year. There are posts on Unclutterer and CNN and The Frontal Cortex. This is something I wrote about some time ago, at least in relation to my personal experience, and it’s interesting to see it unfolding elsewhere.

On a slightly bigger scale, The Atlantic has an article from back in February on What Makes Cities Happy.

And lastly, the FlowingData blog has these two wry charts: Flowchart to lifelong happiness, and Path to happiness gets complicated and confusing.  FlowingData blog, you make me happy.

In the process of looking at language, communication and mental health, I’ve also come across some of my other ways of speaking (both internal and external) that haven’t been particularly healthy.

By far, the most pervasive of these has been ‘should’ (and other ways of saying should – need to, ought to, and so forth). For a born perfectionist and procrastinator, these phrases are the devil. For me they carry loads of guilt, obligation, resentment, self-blame, pressure and expectation. I’m learning to say ‘I will do x’, ‘I’ve chosen not to do x’ and ‘I would like to do x, but don’t have the capacity right now, so I’m putting it on my ‘maybe-someday’ list’. Do or not do, there is no should!

Is this anything more than semantics? Perhaps not, for some. But for me, the improvement in my quality of life is dramatic when I’m not playing ‘should’ and spending every second moment cringing in indecisive guilt.

Part of this, I think, is to do with the sheer weight of indecision, and part to do with the paralysis of perfectionism, but there’s another part too. It comes from the knowledge that committing is to take a side, to make a decision, and to accept that not everyone will agree with my choices.  It’s about not camping on the fence, and not spending my life chasing an unattainable goal of juggling the happiness of others.

One of the most useful books I read last year was Nonviolent Communication. It’s most likely to be found on the self-help shelves, and you know how I feel about the self-help shelves. Nevertheless, I stumbled across a reference to it on the internet it when I was stuck and full of anger and pain, and was searching for a way to talk without lashing out at others. Indeed I think I only noticed it because I’d heard kvratties mention the name in passing. (And indeed I’m still feeling a little shy writing about it here, as I have a quiet horror of becoming Tim Robbins’ character from High Fidelity. ‘Conflict resolution is my job, Laura.’ Oh dear.)

Sidetracking in the direction of John Cusack-alicious films notwithstanding,  the implicit premise of the book is that, for many of us, common use of language and ways of speaking tend to escalate conflict. Assignment of blame, failing to communicate our needs and making demands of others are habitually embedded in the way we speak to one another. Rosenberg proposes a very simple – almost awkwardly so, on first read – practical methodology to deconstruct our ways of speaking to one another and replace them with more functional language.

When I first read the Wikipedia entry for nonviolent communication, it all seemed a bit simplistic and unsubtle, but for me there’s been much value in it. Most significantly, it’s been a tool that’s forced me to articulate (to myself, even) how I really feel, what I really need and what practical things I can do or ask for to get there. And, for someone who previously left these things floating in a fog of inarticulate ‘grrr’, ‘hiss’, ‘rawr’ and ‘purr’ feelings, this has been a huge leap of self-awareness.

I’m unsure much value there may be in nonviolent communication for anyone coming from a family where this kind of healthy interaction was the norm, but for those of us who didn’t, simply learning to say ‘I feel angry’ or ‘I feel invisible’ or ‘I feel sad’ and asking another person if they are willing to help with that – and respecting their response – can be an intensely vulnerable experience.

It’s fundamentally about honesty – about being clear with yourself and with others about what you feel and what you need, and being able to express that without implying expectation or asking more of another person than they are willing to give.  And so, ultimately, it becomes about opting-out of playing games – and if you abhor games and disingenuity as much as I do, that looks like a pretty big win.

On closer examination, this is a pretty damn silly approach. It’s easy enough to talk about sustainable well-being and happiness when things are going well, but I suspect that it’s far more meaningful to talk about applying these things when life is hard going.

And so last month I found myself captive with a netbook on a three hour bus ride, trying to recall just where I left off. Seeing as my list of topics had grown intimidatingly huge, I started to write a number of posts, with the intention of posting one a day for a week. And then I left the half-edited text files on my netbook and didn’t post them. Ahem.

However, today I am sitting on the verandah in the sunshine, with a hammock and a bottle of water, watching the little fishes swim circles in my barrel pond. Today, it seems like a good day to write.

In the grand tradition of previous years, behold my list of retroactive resolutions for 2009!

Refrain from triggering apocalypse.

Spend more time involved in activism of various flavours.

Do many, many things that terrify me.

Spread more love, more of the time.

After all this time spent dabbling in psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, ethics, politics, communication, the productivity movement, the Slow Movement, passion, creativity, genetics, sustainability, love, life, the universe and everything, one would hope that I might consider myself a fundamentally happier human being than before. And so I do. But in the course of reading countless books and engaging in more conversations and debates than I can recall, I also seem to have run headlong into my happiness project’s elephant in the room.

The thing I’ve noticed about ‘happiness’ is that we each mean something different when we use the word. (‘Love’ works the same way, sometimes leading to a whole lot of hurt and misaligned expectations. The ancient Greeks did a little better, distinguishing philia, eros, agape, storge, and xenia.) And yet so few authors, both of the positive psychology genre and otherwise, take adequate space to define what they mean when they use this slippery word, and so few conversations make time for the parties to confirm that they’re both talking about the same thing, instead leaping straight into the talking at cross-purposes.

While reading What Makes Us Happy? over at The Atlantic earlier this year, I noticed that psychiatrist George Valiant uses the term ‘happy-well’ instead of merely ‘happy’. Although a little clumsy, I appreciate this because it not only aligns reasonably well with my own usage of ‘happiness’ but also represents an understanding that the term ‘happy’ alone is profoundly ambiguous.

So…happiness. I’ve seen it used to refer to hedonic pleasure, an absence of suffering, sustainable well-being, an absence of negative feelings, an abundance of positive feelings, the experience of a sense of purpose and meaning, euphoria, balance, contentment in the moment, a more fundamental sense of contentment or ‘rightness’ about one’s life, inner tranquility, complete fatalism or submission to a higher power and more, not to mention that warm feeling induced by a glass of wine or five. And, when you think about it, some of those are very different things indeed.

Reading that list, it strikes me that there’s simply no way that I’d dedicate my time to pursuing some of those user-defined experiences of happiness, nor encourage others to do so. The ‘happiness’ in my happiness project would more accurately be defined as ‘maintaining a sustainable level well-being, physical, psychological and otherwise, through both joy and sadness, with realism, rationality, courage and the conviction that my well-being does not exist in isolation from that of my environment and fellow travellers’. This, of course, makes a crap name for a project. ‘My happiness project’ is much catchier, particularly given that my brain has a damn short attention span sometimes.

However, in spite of its essential ambiguity I still like the word ‘happiness’, just as I appreciate the awkward, elusive, often-tricksy concept that is ‘love’. It’s a big, interesting umbrella-term that’s full of all manner of ideas – many of them contradictory. My happiness project may not be your happiness project, nor even encompass your understanding of happiness, but given that I personally find happiness in complexity and sometimes in contradiction, that’s all well by me.

(crossposted from LiveJournal)

Resources

Some Happy iPhone Apps (Depending On Your Definition of ‘Happy’):
Gratitude Journal
Live Happy
DoGood
I Can Has Cheezburger

Gretchen Rubin’s new Happiness Project Toolbox

My recent del.icio.us links tagged ‘happiness‘