Thursday, April 26, 2012

The Happiness Project, watering camels

I'm reading Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, which I like in spite of myself, though I have to skip most of the parts where she attempts to justify the project by somehow connecting her "spending out" (that's where you intentionally spend money on things you really want, rather than thoughtlessly spending money on things you only kind of want, I think) to feeding starving people or intervening in acts of violence or environmental destruction (since not starving or being blown up or developing cancer all make people happy, too!)

Anyway, the book is really the anti-Genesis; while Rubin allocates a month to spirituality, she sees spiritual practices as activities that function to improve your quality of life, rather than disciplines that are intended to fundamentally reshape your life. Unsurprisingly, the ones she chooses -- keeping a gratitude list, reflecting on mortality, and "reading books about catastrophe", don't exactly work out for her. She downgrades from writing the things she is grateful for to simply thinking about them as she turns on her computer. From her catastrophe reading list, she determines that:

a. her life is easier that those of your average cancer-stricken individual, and
b. she and her husband -- who actually has a potentially life-threatening illness -- should really rework their wills.

I'm not reading Rubin's book just to harp about it; I actually think it's a pretty useful counterpoint to a different extreme in orientation, one to which I am much more vulnerable -- the one in which a person believes that every thing that happens to you happens for a reason, and that your primary focus in life needs to be, not deciding what you want, but preparing yourself to live the life you're called to live.

At times, my tendency to see my life in these terms seems to me to be a weakness, an effect of spending so long dismissing everything I did, wanted, or valued as useless and crappy because it was associated with me. Other times, I just recognize it was the way I was taught to live -- putting others first, aspiring to serve. While in some ways I am incredibly selfish, it's usually unconscious; if asked, I'd tell you that I shouldn't be that way, that my life, in the end, isn't, and shouldn't be, all about me. It's never felt as legitimate to say: "I want to _______" as it has to say "I want to do what God wants me to do."

Like Rebekah did, I guess. I'll point out that acting according to God's directions is more straightforward in these stories, which leave you with the impression that God is going around talking out loud to people -- though, on second thought, I'm not entirely sure that Genesis has to be read that way. I get jealous of these characters because it seems so easy for them; if God were talking to me, I'd listen, too. It does kind of rework the story to imagine that the God telling them to leave their families and kill their sons is a spiritual, abstract one.

I know how people with no real spiritual orientation think about this kind of quandary. I sometimes think it too -- though I know I'm not supposed to and though I generally see this line of questioning as my own weakness and not a flaw in the concept of faith itself: what if I really believe I'm in a relationship with Christ, and that the choices I make step from this higher purpose, and it turns out I was just talking to myself?

More pressing: what do I do if I'm really trying, praying and withdrawing and going to God, and I don't seem to be getting any direction beyond what I already knew? What was Rebekah doing all that time before Abraham's servant shows up all "God sent a sign" this and "come marry my master's son" that?

Well, honestly, it seems that in those meantimes, what Rubin's doing works for her and might for me: she does come up with any number of things to fill her life with, and whether or that's what we're here for, as she argues it is, she does seem to be happier for doing them.

Towards the end of the book, her husband suggests that she benefited from the project because it gave her a sense of control. But I wonder if some of the satisfaction actually came from living in accordance with her values. There's a disconnect if you say that you love your family more than anything, but you're always crabbing at them, or if you are passionate about x, but you spend your life doing y. This is as true (or more so) if those values are largely about God and others, but you spend your life in pursuits that are largely self-serving, which, you know, is me, on a lot of days.

And it's also true that while Genesis is organized around a chosen people fulfilling their chosen purpose, there's a lot of down time that doesn't get covered. Rebekah's not meditating on God's purpose for her life when it comes up and finds her; she's doing the very ordinary work that comprises her life right now. The Bible seems not to have time for all those ordinary moments in which its characters are becoming the kind of people who are able to fill the purposes God works out for them. It may be the case that God expects us to participate in that process a little more concretely.

And it's also true that if you've been given a great deal, as I have, and if you believe those things come from God, as I do, then it's kind of an insult not to embrace those things, appreciate them, and fully live the life you've been given. And that, spiritual or not, most people seem to struggle to live deliberately, in accordance with what they value and believe, and that I am one of those people.

When I take a breath from finding fault with what Rubin's done with this book (and the accompanying website, of course), the bulk of her project seems to be focused on resolving that dissonance. That is something I can get behind, until or unless some sort of divine purpose stumbles into my lap.

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