This one is for all the parents and soon-to-be parents reading…
Parenting is pure happiness.
Full of mumminess and pappiness
You jump for joy
When you hear “It’s a boy”
And the room is filled with clappiness
Feel free to add your own limericks to complete the story. Let’s see how creative you can be. After all, what follows are sleepless nights, first steps, birthday parties, ballet lessons and hockey games..
Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slow, was a guest of Christine Louise Hohlbaum at the blog “The Power of Slow”. Carl offered ten tips on how to slow down the pace of your life. Here is that top-10 list:
Downsize your calendar.
Question your inner speed demon.
Take up a slow hobby.
Stop clock-watching.
Rediscover the joys of the table.
Take a walk.
Meditate.
Consider an alternative approach to your health.
Vacation slowly.
Turn it off.
It is comforting to know that I do about half of these. For more details on each of these points, you can read the interview here.
…is a blank screen. According to a 31-year study of 30,000 people, TV sucks. My wife won’t want to hear this, because she is tired of hearing me lecture about how I would rather do things than watch others do things. Of course, my idea of doing things is not always what the study says will bring most happiness, being somewhat of a hermit…
“TV doesn’t really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,” says University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson, the study co-author. “It’s more passive and may provide escape, especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.”
Robinson and his research team compared the activities of people who described themselves as happy with peeople who described themselves as unhappy. The unhappy people watched 20 percent more television than the happy people. Those who considered themselves to be happy were more likely to:
Just a quick blog note today to let you know that I am quoted in the new Words to Help You Be Happy in All the Ways That Matter Most book, by Blue Mountain Arts.
This is a quotations book, and I am joined by a number of people you have probably heard of, such as Mary Lou Retton, Victor Hug and Suzanne Somers, as well as fresh, new voices. You can find my quote on page 50 (actually, it is most of page 50).
As you can see, Amazon.com does not yet even have a cover image of the book, so you can be one of the first to pick up a copy. (The copies do already exist - I am staring at one right now on my desk.)
Happiness can be found wherever you look for it. For instance, in the Dancer from Khiva. This is a Russian book, translated into English, about Bibish, who was kidnapped and driven out to the desert to be gang-raped…and life rolls on from there with all the consequences, such as never being able to be married as a result (but she does). And never being able to dance because dancing is frowned upon in her village (but you know the title of the book!)
There si a more complete review of the book here, but they message for you today is that we all are driven down the road of circumstance, but we all have the option of turning the steering wheel. Yes, some things happen that really suck. It is up to you to decide just how badly they will suck and how happy you will choose to be, despite circumstances.
The problem with Mr. Garver is probably not so much his grumpiness, but his poor sense of direction. See what else he says, “The reason you can’t find the kind of book you’re looking for is that all the self-help books about how to be happy fill up the shelves. Ironically, this makes some of us quite unhappy.”
Fortunately for us and for the sake of clarity, he does specify what kind of book you’re looking for. A real book. Hey, those are his words, not mine.
If books about happiness and self-help are not what he is looking for, why is he looking in the self-help section? I have to assume he is simply lost, because obviously he won’t find any real books there. Either that, or he is a very grumpy man with a great sense of theatrics (not to mention irony). And nothing makes a grumpy person grumpier than a happy person saying to him, “Smile!” (Yes, grumpy people really, really hate happy photographers!)
If the bookstores would kindly provide visitors with maps when they enter the store, people who don’t want to be happy can avoid accidentally finding themselves surrounded by all those threatening smiley faces. And they can get on with the business of finding “real books”, which apparently bookstores don’t seem to stock anymore.
That oughta solve the problem.
Hmm…I wonder what he would think of a happiness blog.
Yes, it’s official. People with strong literacy skills are happier than those who struggle with reading. But I didn’t have to tell you that, right?
A study by the National Literacy Trust shows that men and women alike are less likely to marry, less likely to own a home, more likely to live still with their parents and less likely to feel satisfied with life if they can’t read.
Of course, you always have to be careful, because statistics can say pretty much whatever you want. Lower literacy means a lower paying job in most cases, which might in turn explain the findings. Or lower levels of happiness in certain people might lead then to read less and learn less. Cause and effect are not always easy to establish.
That being said, literacy facilitates so much that a focus on increasing a person’s literacy should help them in many facets of their lives, most likely also in their happiness (being able to read is very empowering).
And if literacy in one language is empowering, what about literacy in several?
Today’s Los Angeles Times has a feature on happiness, my favorite topic. The feature helps debunk a lot of myths, mostly that things and circumstances make us happy, sad, angry or whatever. Here is the paragraph that most people should read:
Lyubomirsky and her colleagues analyzed studies on identical twins and other research and came to the conclusion that happiness is 50% genetic, 40% intentional and 10% circumstantial. “Half of your predisposition toward happiness you can’t change,” she says. “It’s in your genes. Your circumstances — where you live, your health, your work, your marriage — can be tough to change. But most people are surprised that circumstances don’t account for as much of their happiness as they think.”
Just for the record, there really is not an accurate way to measure happiness, because ti is such a subjective issue. However, a 50-50 divide between genetics and environment is generally considered a good rough estimate by more happiness researchers. Depending on the effort you make or do not make, I am sure that number is very elastic, but let’s play with that number for now.
The L.A. Times feature continues on other pages, too. For instance, there is an excellent list of handy tips for “cultivating happiness” .
A paragraph in National Geographic Adventure caught my attention. This is a tale of leaving the Big Apple to carve out a life in very rural - and isolated - Vermont.
At night, lying in bed with the windows open and ticking off our list of problems, we’d hear a barred owl hooting –”Who cooks for you?”–and be struck by the small scale of our worries. Were we to fade away, Cathy said, that owl would be here anyway, keeping someone else awake with its questioning call, questioning nothing.
Yes, our problems are pretty small. They just seem big because they are happening to us. Sometimes it takes the big wide world to put our challenges into perspective.
Over at the Accumulating Peripherals blog, there is a discussion on the pros and cons of happiness research. Matt offers explains his beef with happiness research and I have commented also on the discussion.
Much of the happiness research out there is based on self reporting. In other words, it asks you if you feel happy. OK, so the questions are more complex, but it basically asks for your opinion. On the one hand, that is poor science, because our perceptions of things are rarely accurate. A good example is how a couple high-profile crimes can get a city or even a whole country talking about how the crime rate is on the rise and it’s about time we stop the growing menace — even while statistics show that year after year the crime rate has slowly been declining.
On the other hand, happiness is a subjective thing. It is something we feel, and it could be argued that the only valid measurement of happiness is our perception of it. Please feel free to go over to Matt’s blog and comment. And then please come back here and comment, too.
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