This is a photo taken on the first day of spring at a beautiful little local park in the Hudson Valley; I always think of the arrival of spring as a time of awakenings, new beginnings and a sense of renewal.
Last spring I finished reading “The Happiness Project” by author Gretchen Rubin. It’s much easier reading than the “self-help/personal growth” book I read before that, called “Eat Pray Love” (by author Elizabeth Gilbert). I actually started to read “Eat Pray Love” quite a while ago, but gave up on it because I couldn’t slog through the early, self indulgent chapters about Liz Gilbert’s crumbling marriage, her divorce drama and her relationship with a young man named David. It was long on navel gazing and neurosis and I couldn’t take it, so I gave up!
But I so wanted to read her account of being in India, at the ashram of David’s guru, so I decided one day to start all over again with “Eat Pray Love” and reread it from the beginning. I kept going as she began her inner and outer journey, traveling from NYC to Italy, then India and finally Bali. I’m so glad I finished the book. I enjoyed it more and more as I kept reading, and her stories of India and her profound inner opening and spiritual awakenings were very valuable to me as I continued to write "Soul Tripper,” the memoir about my own spiritual and life journey.
For the past few years, I’ve been reading some “find yourself” type of books, generally centering on a woman’s quest for authenticity, wholeness and spiritual awakening. I’ve been in that kind of questioning, reevaluating phase of my life for a few years, so I gravitated toward those types of books, and I feel like I learned a lot from them. As much as I liked “Eat Pray Love” though, I’m finding that “The Happiness Project” is really directly applicable to my own life.
To find fulfillment, inner peace and self actualization, the heroine of “Eat Pray Love” had to divorce her husband, throw off the bonds of comfortable domesticity, put her worldly belongings in storage, get some money together and travel to far off exotic places like Italy, India and Indonesia, make new foreign friends, find a foreign lover, learn a new language, and meet a Balinese medicine man. Phew!
My head spins just thinking about all that sweeping change. But as Gretchen Rubin, the author of “The Happiness Project” says: suppose we don’t want to abandon our homes, marriages, jobs, relationships and travel halfway around the world to be happy? What if we want to find happiness in our own backyard, to feel self actualized and authentic against the backdrop of our existing lives, right in our own kitchen?
That’s really the boat I’m in. I’d love to travel the world, but I’m not in a position to find myself by traveling to foreign lands right now. I have a certain amount of personal freedom because I’m single, I’m freelancing, and I don’t own a home, etc. But I can’t pack a backpack, hit the road right now and leave everything I know in search of what’s out there, what is Ultimate Truth, and what’s the truest part of me. I’d like to have a profound life altering experience in my own home, or maybe at the local park! I’m all for travel, but I’ve always suspected that the real journey is within...
This is why I enjoy “The Happiness Project” and find it so valuable. Gretchen Rubin invites us to use the book and the tools at her web sites to start our own, very personal “Happiness Project” because as she points out: each project is unique to each individual person, so my happiness project will look a lot different than your happiness project. However, we can all learn a lot about happiness by sharing information and inspiration about what has (and hasn’t) worked for us as we strive to be happier.
“The Happiness Project” begins with her January happiness resolutions, which center on increasing energy and vitality through things like clearing clutter, downsizing and organizing, getting healthy through exercise and getting more sleep.
I’ve been doing some clutter busting this past month, cleaning out and organizing, letting go of some things I’ve held onto for years. I noticed that when I first began going through a huge mass of notes and papers that accumulated around my writing area, I felt an odd sense of dread and uneasiness at attacking this clutter. Maybe the clutter is like some sort of cloak drawn around me, a safety zone of messy good intentions. I found pile after pile of scribbled notes, abandoned to-do lists, ideas of things to write about and possible markets, pipe dreams and some good intentions that never seemed to pan out.
It’s scary to wipe away that protective clutter and realize how I procrastinate sometimes. It’s a little daunting to face things that didn’t work out and to look realistically at failed to-do lists and the “maybe someday” type of wish lists that seem to surround my desk. The first days I found it hard to clear my clutter away, then it got liberating! I am the type of pack rat who scrawls a valuable reminder or even a password on slips of paper that are then buried in a stack of useless clutter! So I wanted to clean out carefully, finding a system to drill down to the valuable information while clearing out useless garbage.
I purchased a few very small wire bound notepads (I think they call them flip pads?) from the local big box store. One is for passwords and the most important information I want to keep handy, and the other notepad is for web sites I want to make a note of, or other things I might want to remember. This system is working really well for me. As I attack the piles around my computer and my awfully cluttered desk drawer (the “drawer of shame,” you should see it!) I simply go through the pieces of paper, tossing the old stuff and making a note of what’s useful before I throw it away.
I can’t believe all the really useful information I’ve found as I’ve gone through the clutter and organized the rest! I unearthed some notes about possible coaches for the solo shows I’m developing. I found a few extremely helpful notes I’d taken about freelance writing sites. I’m having “so that’s where that was!” epiphanies on a daily basis. I feel so organized, and the other day I realized I was having spontaneous bursts of emotion that I could only label as...happiness!
I’ve surely got the organizing fever! I’m filing new material as it comes into my office so it won’t sit around, become clutter (and multiply in the night like rabbits!) I cleaned off one whole shelf that had been covered up with clutter for a year! I even polished said shelf with a duster and enjoyed the space! I like to call it my “Zen shelf”...a little oasis of calm and order that I can gaze on with a feeling of accomplishment!
I guess my “Happiness Project” is part of what I call “Allison 2.0” Or maybe I should call it “Allison 3.0.” What I’ve recognized as this third major shift or phase in my life. The first phase of my life I was more indoctrinated into what mass culture and those around me thought I should be: secretly wanting to follow my own path, thinking my own thoughts, but afraid to really fully express me. That was when I was studying business when my authentic self wanted to be a creative artist, and an actor.
Then came the next phase, which was brewing in me for a long time: I could no longer deny my artist self and I made her central to my life. I even threw off a lot of my old thinking and searched for my own authenticity (a process that’s still continuing). I like to call that my Hippie “Bohemian” phase, and if I could have found a way to go off the grid, live in a yurt in the woods, I would have. A lot of the revolution just occurred in my own soul, with new ways of thinking and a liberated viewpoint, a real awakening to consciousness, and who I am as a being on this planet.
Something shifted in me last summer which brought me to life phase three, I’m in right now. It’s sort of a blending of the earliest Allison and Bohemian artist Allison into the truest, most authentic me. Events of last year made me realize I didn’t have to reject all of my earliest experiences, which I thought of as constricting and not the “real me.” But I realized that a lot of people seemed to remember me fondly from my younger years, that Ali had made a positive impression on friends and teachers, so there had to be something authentic there, of me, coming through to those people.
When I published my first article, it was at the start of a new decade in my life, and I’ve been publishing articles and working on my writing as I move through this decade. For the remainder of this decade I pray for balance and to work on uncovering my true self, blending the best of past selves with new discoveries about me, to bring it all into balance as a harmonious whole: younger me, older me, current me. I’ve heard it said that the self is rather fluid and shifting and can change a lot from hour to hour, day to day.
I’ve learned something from “The Happiness Project” book that anchors me, and keeps me in touch with what I perceive as “self” even if it is constantly growing and changing: be yourself. She strives to “Be Gretchen” I strive to “Be Allison.”
Sounds simple, but it can be hard. I do it by paying attention to my own likes and dislikes, to what feels right and wrong to me, what feels uniquely me. Yes, this feels like Allison, no those values aren’t mine, maybe that is for me, but I’m really not sure. It’s a constant process of “self” discovering, staying true to yourself. I feel like the clutter busting is an affirmation of self. I’ve heard that the universe responds to action! And when we clear space in our life, get rid of what’s not working, we make room for new positive things to flow into our lives. Maybe that could result in more energy to get a project done, the courage to go in a new direction, or something great showing up in my life, like abundance!
Can’t wait to see what happens. If you’re looking to make changes and like personal growth reading, check out “The Happiness Project” as it could inspire you to start a happiness project of your own!
