How not be happy
For the listmakers among us
Greetings, dear readers. I hope you’re managing to keep cool or warm (depending on your hemisphere), and finding wonder in the ordinary.
I’ve been working on an essay that isn’t quite ready, so I’m sharing this short piece for fun. It’s from the Caravan Writers Collective write-in yesterday with Paul Corman-Roberts. He gives the best prompts! And it’s always an inspiring group of writers. Try it sometime.
Try to be happy; that is, make happiness a goal.
Prioritize making other people happy, especially your partner, your children, your friends.
Beat yourself up when you forget to prioritize the happiness of others.
Be too busy for self-care. Self care is selfish, anyhow.
Read the news
Resolve to be a better person, one that counts to 10 or 20 before answering when someone pisses you off, then go off on a co-worker who doesn’t deserve your equanimity.
Read a book (podcasts and audiobooks count) about how simple it is, really, to be happy. Be inspired to stick Post-It-note aphorisms to your bathroom mirror, around your desk, on your car’s dashboard. When you no longer notice them, take them down. Too much clutter. Clutter derails happiness.
Go to an art museum alone to stroll and stop at paintings that call to you, feeling lucky not to be distracted by a friend’s pedantic taste. Forget to put your phone on Do Not Disturb; respond when your college friend group chat blows up about whether “The Odyssey” is misogynist. Wish you’d brought someone to join you in mocking an over-hyped installation in the corner, a pile of dirt and broken glass and feathers that is somehow about climate change. Be gutted by a Walker Evans photo of a scruffy child that reminds you of the article you read that morning about immigrant children, alone, unrepresented, being railroaded by fast English-speakers in a cold courtroom.
Start a Gratitude Journal, then stay up late to binge Season 5 of “House” and forget to write in it, then do the same thing the next night with Season 6. Repurpose the journal to make lists like this.
List all the ambitions that animated and then paralyzed you.
Like the piano you ignored for years when you could’ve played it and now it’s gone, given away for a downsizing move.
Or the watercolor paints languishing in a closet.
Keep making lists like this.
You’re invited!
This Friday, 7 August, at 3:00 PM EST, I’ll be chatting with Nina Schuyler, author of the forthcoming novel, Open the Floodgates. I can’t wait to dig into it with her! I have so many questions.
In her story, the River is granted personhood and now has the right—and urgent need—to go to court and argue for its existence. It’s alive and talking, and so are the pigeons, deer, the muddy bottom, a crow, and more. Once Nina decided that humans are not exceptional but part of the fabric of the universe, the door to subjectivity flew open, and she found the world wonderfully alive with a lot to say. Pub date: 9-15-26. Preorders available now.
Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.
If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.
I am chuckling ruefully about this listicle, and about our tendencies to first, beat ourselves up because we're not the people we think we "should" be, and second, to want this figuring-out of who we are and how to live mindfully and happily and in reciprocation with Sweet Gaia, our amazing planet, to be easy. To be simple, encapsulated in those post-it note aphorisms that become so much clutter (but which also may carry a grain of truth). I'm in the hone-it-down-to-what-matters-most phase of my life, and that is not at all simple, Marie Kondo or no! Blessings and many thanks for being here, Julie.
Too funny, especially the one about the piano--since I've been agonizing for days over whether I should give my Roland keyboard away because we're "simpler-sizing" and I haven't sat down at it for quite awhile. Because of reading this, I'm keeping it! Thanks for the chuckle while we're languishing here in the (heat) bubble!