people are poor predictors of what will make us happy.

 it’s like that time when i was in middle school and i begged my parents for a liz claiborne purse. my new bag did not transport me into a world devoid ofangst, pimples, failed flirtations, and latin tutors. i would need something else to make me happy: a spot on the basketball team, acceptance to the college of my choice, an adventurous summer trip, a boyfriend, a husband, a house, a meaningful vocation, children, children who take long afternoon naps, decent savings, balance, and the list goes on. according to a host of articles and popular books  written by daniel gilbert and his posse of fellow harvard researchers , i am not alone in my often misguided planning for a happy future.

“we treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of the cat in the hat so that someday theywill have fatcheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps” (from dan gilbert’s stumbling upon happiness).

of course, we cannot simply forget about the future. i’m going to keep brushing my teeth twice a day to ward off future root canals. but gilbert’s findings could bring about a paradigm shift for people of every age and stage. perhaps the empty-nester who is plotting out a happy retirement, the young mother who is pining for the day all of her children are out of diapers, and the upstart professional who revels in visions of a corner office would live differently if they believed that,

“bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. that’s true of good things, too. we adapt very quickly to either” (from a new york times interview of dan gilbert).

last week, i started making a list of things that make me happy. these are not things that i imagine will evoke happiness in the future. rather, when i am in the middle of my every day life, and when i have a sudden flash of awareness that i am, in that very moment, experiencing happiness, i write down what i’m doing. so far, it appears that i will not have to finagle an extraordinary future to enjoy my life. as it turns out, i am happy when i am folding clothes on the bed while my children are snuggling together watching word world. i am happy reading outside in the sun during my children’s nap times. i am happy when i am doing things that are athletic. i am happy when i’m sharing a bag of kettle corn with a good friend. i am happy when i am pondering a new idea.

this is helpful information, since the enterprise of parenting is so future-oriented. i will always probably be a poor predictor of what makes me happy. but, perhaps, with a little more awareness, i will begin to recognize happiness when i stumble upon it, not in far off dreams of  diaper- free days, not in fleeting visions of a more career-focused life, but in the present moment, as messy and harried and beautiful as it is.

“i have such a good life, i want to appreciate it more — and live up to it better” (13).

this is gretchen rubin’s explanation for why she has written the happiness project, an account of her year-long experiment to increase her appreciation for life. and this is also my explanation for why i wanted to read her book. rubin takes seriously current research that purports that 50 percent of one’s level of happiness is genetic, 10 to 20 percent is tied to life circumstances, and the “remainder is a product of how a person thinks and acts” (6).

after a period of introspection about what sorts of factors affect her personal level of happiness, rubin comes up with 12 goals and works on one each month. included in the happiness project are things like being mindful and paying attention to life’s details, reading more, staying in touch with friends, and lightening up her parenting approach. the idea is that readers will come up with their own particular sets of goals and carry out their own experiments in happiness. but there does seem to be one universal cornerstone of happiness, valued so highly by rubin that she makes it her goal for january. in a word, this factor is…

rubin sites research that suggests that “along with tight work deadlines, a bad night’s sleep [is] one of the top two factors that upset people’s daily moods” (19). furthermore, “getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person’s daily happiness than getting a $60,000 raise” (19).

the critical reading glasses i learned to don in college and grad school make me want to question these assertions. but the parent in me knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the importance of sleep could never be overstated. sleep is everything. without it, chasing a toddler feels like running against the wind with a parachute on your back.* with sleep, it’s possible to host a play date, cook dinner, deal with a sick dog, talk to one’s boss on the phone, and smile — all at the same time.

i’m not sure whether or not i’ll conduct my own happiness project. what i do know is that i am completely sold on the benefits of a sleep project. in fact, i’ve already started. last night i got ten uninterrupted hours of sleep. that’s right, TEN HOURS! but i’m on vacation, and my parents are keeping my kids. the real test will come on wednesday, when i return home to my kiddos and routine. will i go to bed earlier or succumb to the mind-numbing television that i dearly love?

oh, and if you’ve just put your kids to bed and you are up too late reading blogs, go to bed! when you wake up, you’ll feel like $60,000 dollars.

[source info for this post can be found on the bibliography page located on the sidebar to your right.]

*as i tried to think of metaphors that fully describe the difficulty of feeling sleep-deprived while chasing a toddler, all i could think of were other things pertaining to parenting a toddler. as it turns out, being sleepy while chasing a toddler is like pushing a stroller up hill, snagging a toddler from the stairs 50 times a day, looming over a toddler in the baby pool, cleaning up after a toddler eats yogurt, et cetera. in short, chasing a toddler on four hours of sleep is like, well, CHASING A TODDLER ON FOUR HOURS OF SLEEP!

as my parents tell the story, i began begging them for piano lessons just a few weeks before i turned four. when my requests persisted long enough to surpass the lifespan of most preschool whims, they took me to my first lesson. i had four different teachers in 13 years, during which time i discovered that i inherited the “playing by ear” gene from my great aunt billie. this discovery corresponded with my prideful refusal to practice and my less-than-enthusiastic attitude toward reading music… but i digress.

now that my little monkey is living out the last few weeks of his third year, i find myself hoping that he will clearly articulate or exhibit some sort of special interest in something. i don’t expect him to be a prodigy, nor do i want to usurp all of his free time (and mine) with a slew of resume-building activities. i do not want to enter him in pageants or groom him for the u.s. olympic swim team. but i do feel responsible for introducing him to activities that he might enjoy and arenas where he might experience success. these expectations seem reasonable enough, right?

but bordering on ridiculous is my somewhat unreasonable dream that one of my sons become a bluegrass fiddle player. this dream is merely the resurrected form of my own desires to play the fiddle. these desires died a painful death after a three-month fiddle rental and the fact that the excruciating series of cat mating sounds that followed caused my husband to question his decision to marry me. i now surround my children with bluegrass fiddle music and take every opportunity to impart to them my appreciation for its beauty. in my more generous moments, i have even been known to expand my hopeful projections to include instruments such as the banjo and the mandolin.

even so, i agree with ayelet waldman, who writes in her book, bad mother, that “the point of a life, any life, is to figure out what you are good at, and what makes you happy, and, if you are very fortunate, spend your life doing those things” (205).

it is my job to help my children do this. it is not my job to raise little people to fill the gaps in my own talents and sense of happiness.  i know this. and i know how to use the cd player to fill my home with bluegrass music, and how to play the piano by ear (thank you mom, dad, and great aunt billie). what i am less sure about is how to weave together the monkey’s leanings and my instincts, how to avoid over programming him and under programming him, and how to help him gracefully accept the inevitable failures that are mile markers on the way to success.

thoughts?