This week, I crossed an item off my lifetime bucket list—on a recent trip to Portland, Maine, I saw the northern lights. I’ve always wanted to see them, especially after I started reading the brilliant works of Philip Pullman; his novel The Golden Compass is one of my very favorites. I was interested to observe that because my smartphone camera was able to capture more light than my eye, the lights in the photograph look more vivid than they did in real life—IRL, the sky was a dull purple.
Onward,
5 Things Making Me Happy
World Mental Health Day was October 10th, and to mark the event, Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos of the Happiness Lab podcast assembled the “Titans of Happiness”: a crew of hosts and happiness experts from the top wellness podcasts. I was thrilled to join this panel, and all of us were a little starstruck by another extra special guest…Elmo. We talk hacks for building relationships with others, Elmo’s viral moment, and self compassion. Listen to part 1 here.
Yes, I’m talking about Dolly Parton again. Of the many things that I admire about Dolly Parton, I admire that she’s honest about her origins, and she’s honest about her stardom. Perhaps that is true humility: To be who we are, without puffery or false modesty. For a lighthearted example, watch her sing a song she wrote for her 9/19/1979 appearance on the Johnny Carson Show. It’s fun to watch the whole interview; her song starts at minute 10:55.
I love to tackle clutter, and I’m exploring the open-door/empty-nest phase of life, so I loved watching this video from Dana K. White about what she was clearing out of her house now that her children are all in college. Bonus: I learned that wearing homecoming mums is a Texas tradition.
I recently learned two new words that I find a bit confusing, perhaps because each is a single term that describes a set of multiple pieces. Why do I find that hard to grasp? “Garniture” is a set of decorative accessories, like three matching vases meant for a mantelpiece. “Parure” is a set of three or more jewelry pieces meant to be worn together, like a ring, bracelet, pair of earrings, necklace, brooch.
Remember to register to vote! Make your plan to cast your ballot! I mailed in my ballot this week.
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This week on Happier with Gretchen Rubin
PODCAST EPISODE: 504
We discuss a listener’s suggestion for scheduling a “sour hour” of complaints and grievances. We also share some useful information about how to relieve the pain of muscle knots, as well as some ideas for avoiding avoidance.
INTERVIEW
Julie Fingersh
Julie Fingersh is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in in The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, Businessweek, The Huffington Post, and more. Her new book, Stay: A Story of Family, Love, and Other Traumas, is available now.
Q: Can you suggest something we might try to help ourselves to become happier, healthier, more productive, or more creative?
Well, there’s a reason that I named my Substack newsletter “Take My Advice. I’m Not Using It” But seriously, I find these things are extremely effective, especially when I do them.
To become Happier: Carve out a block of real time alone. It can be an hour, an afternoon, or a weekend away. It won’t work unless it’s long enough to tear yourself away from the siren calls of everyone else’s needs, to stop the tide of everything blinking at you, especially notifications, posts, likes, resumes, guilt and obligation-related activities of any kind. I realize this is pure indulgence. But if you can’t create the space to spend time alone with yourself and your thoughts, how will you ever know what you really want? For me, it meant going on a writing retreat, a total break from all other roles in life – mother, sister, wife, community member. Those four days were the first time I’d been alone, tending to my own inner life, which changed the course of my life. But any kind of solo retreat will work. Then do an auto-interview. This is where you ask yourself the big questions. What matters to you? How are you spending your time and towards what end? Do your values and priorities align with your every day? It’s often said that writers write so that they can learn what they think, but the truth is? Writing down your thoughts works for everyone. It’s an amazingly efficient way to get to the truth and your path to a happier life.
To become Healthier: Get an accountability partner and commit, once and for all, to exercise. I spent the first four decades of my life in a battle with exercise. I hated it. Then I got to the other side. How? I couldn’t have done it without (a) my friend, Lisa, who made me go running with her for the first few months, even though I kept saying “I hate running!” and “I’m not a runner!” and then (b) “Sex in the City” which I only allowed myself to watch if I were exercising the elliptical. By the time I finished the series, I was a runner. Seventeen years later, especially as I approach (gulp) 60 (?), I feel grateful every day that my body allows me to find the peace and mental health break that exercise offers. It’s a sense of well-being in mind and body that I find nothing else can bring.
To become more creative/productive: Best advice I ever took was to read, study and do all the exercises in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. This is the book that put me back in touch with my creativity. After thirty years of being a blocked writer, locked in a prison of my making, Cameron’s book was the first step to freeing myself. (Turns out there was a lot more to it, but this was an essential first step)
Q: In your own life, have you found ways to tap into the power of your five senses?
Your book is such a great testament to the power of the senses. The secret, for me, is to have a few small rituals that facilitate instant connection between my body/self, my daily life, and the outside world. As newish empty nesters (open-doorers?) my husband, Dave, and I recently started dividing time between our long-time home in the SF Bay Area and a little town in Connecticut.
Every morning, we take a walk outside, coffee in hand, just around the block. We stop and take in the vastly different architecture, sounds, smells of the Northeast. It’s funny because I used to look at older people and think: What are you doing there, sitting on that bench? Don’t you have things to do? Now I know. They’re experiencing life through their senses in a way that my younger mind has trouble doing in its default race against time. The great thing is, you can start to give this part of life weight right this second. Every day, we do at least one thing to savor the day’s rhythms, whether with that morning walk or an evening cocktail hour at dusk, even if it’s sparkling water. And night walks! It’s amazing how different the air can smell first thing in the morning and late at night. It’s like a reward for making the time.
Once awake to your senses, it’s like giving yourself as many tickets as you allow yourself to the theatre of nature. Or the savoring the sensory experience of cooking and eating. Or just taking in all the “nutrition for the eyes,” as a yoga teacher I know once described the simple act of laying your eyes on beautiful things. The trick, I think, is to see that doing these things are just as important and meaningful as anything else you could be doing.
Q: Is there a particular motto that you’ve found very helpful? (I remind myself to “Be Gretchen.”) Or a quotation that has struck you as particularly insightful?
Yes! The motto that’s guided, clarified, and comforted me all my life is this: All roads lead to where you are. Almost every single one of the most defining events of my life came to pass through situations that were hard/miserable/disappointing. Sometimes it feels like the story of our lives are unfolding in front of our faces and we’re too close to, or it’s too soon to, know how one thing is going to lead to another.
One of the most humiliating hours of my life was when I sprained my ankle right off of the bus as I was starting an Outward Bound course at 16 years old. As a result I had to change my summer plans on a dime, which eventually lead me to my life as I know it now. Writing about this incident 35 years later was also the very story that got me my break back into professional writing with a story for Oprah Magazine. That’s one of so many things I can look back on now and see were absolutely necessary for something else monumental to happen later. You just never, never know what will lead to what. And there’s a great comfort in that.
Q: What simple habit boosts your happiness or energy?
Attention all fellow hyper focusers/overthinkers/overworkers like myself:
My answer is definitely and always this: Picking up the phone and having an unrushed, undistracted call or (even better) date in real life with someone in your life whose company or presence brings you joy.
Connecting deeply and authentically with other people (or animals!) is the thing that’s available to ALL of us, for free. It’s also, in my mind, the fastest and most efficient path to happiness and new energy.
AND it’s the thing that especially we Americans find the hardest thing to do. We don’t feel we can just sit back and enjoy life until we’ve checked off a certain number of things on The List, which of course is infinite.
Our society unfortunately worships at the altar of productivity, but it doesn’t have to be so. So many other countries value time and relationships over work. (I still remember my host family’s two-hour lunches in France when I was on a high school trip, and thinking: don’t you people work??? Get back to work!!)
As long as we’re breathing, it’s our choice: You can take the time to call a friend or you can do the thing so you can check it off your list. Pretty much no one cares. No one is watching. But it’s your life that you’re creating in every moment. And no one creates it but us, choice by choice by choice. Estie, my Hungarian grandmother used to say, “Jula, don’t take life so seriously. Enjoy your life. Enjoy your life.” And this is a woman who left home at 17 to lead her family to safety in a new land right before the Nazis came. So she should know.
Q: Has a book ever changed your life—if so, which one and why?
In eleventh grade, I took a southern literature class. I didn’t know anything about southern lit, but I liked the smell of Mr. Atkison’s pipe and thought it was fun that he smoked it during class, so I signed up. Besides introducing me to some of the greatest writers in literature – Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, he assigned us a book called The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. I figured, well, I like movies! But it turned out, this was not a book about a guy who went to movies. It was a book about a man, Binx Bolling, who was obsessed with something called The Search. Through Binx, Walker Percy gave language to something I’d deeply felt, and it was then that I came under the spell of the power of literature to illuminate and even change our own lives. I can remember bursting out of class after we were finished with the book, my mind exploding. Life! The Search! I’ve been on it ever since.
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