New beginnings

It's been a while since my last post, but I have been busy wrapping up 8 years of living and working in Sydney and moving back to the UK.  The gems of wisdom picked up from reading some great books have helped make this move feel like the start of an exciting new chapter in life where we can put some of these ideas into practice.

So...what's on the agenda?

1.  Finding fulfilling work

I've had 6 months off and loved having a slower pace of life at home, but I'm ready to get back into it. I'll be going back to Roman Krznaric's wise book How to Find Fulfilling Work to remind myself how to go about this.

2.  My Happiness Project

One of my favourite books, Gretchen Rubin's fantastic Happiness Project, contains what she calls her First Splendid Truth:

"To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth"

Tonnes of things are making me feel good at the moment - being in the same time zone as my friends and family, writing actual letters to my best friend (which we started doing when we were teenagers) and spending lots of time with my kids. I am loving being in England again despite the bitterly cold weather at the moment, it is my spiritual home!  The growth part is definitely covered by the total change in living circumstances...new people...new places...new things to do.  All that's left is to tackle the "feeling bad" part which for me is about doing the things I avoid...

3.  Finding a home

We have lived in 5 different houses in the year since my last post.  Now we're looking for a home where we can grow things, make things, keep chickens and know our neighbours and we won't want to move again for a very very long time.  Great books  Happier at Home and the Architecture of Happiness will help with the deliberations...otherwise, Homes & Gardens magazine will do for eye candy.

4.  Learning and doing new things

What life's all about really isn't it?  I have gushed about the School of Life before and just found out about The Idler...wow...I wish there was one near me.  Another institution promoting the benefits of making things.  If I knit a tea cosy will it bring my life greater enjoyment and satisfaction? Maybe it will, I had an email today from Radio 4 to say they love knitting and will be celebrating it all next week.  Aaah, it's great to be back in England.

Happier at Home

I mentioned recently that, in the midst of my house move, I re-read Happier at Home by Gretchen Rubin.  Now, I'm a big fan of Gretchen Rubin's writing and became an even bigger fan when it turned out she is also a super nice lady (more on that later).  This post has taken me ages to write because Happier at Home is packed with, well, so much stuff, and I just couldn't pin down what I wanted to say.  So, in the spirit of "done is better than perfect" (a Gretchen-ism I like to remind myself of regularly), here's a collection of highlights and thoughts about the book.    

So - what's it about? Rubin describes the book as her account of the strategies that she used to feel more at home, at home.  In contrast to the messages in The Architecture of Happiness, which is all about the physical make up of buildings and their contents, Rubin doesn't really focus on this. She talks about what goes on in (and around) the home, and openly admits that she's not really interested in interior design. In fact, she said it had been a relief to her when she realised that her style of apartment didn't have to reflect any deep truths about her, and that it was enough that it be a pleasant, comfortable place to live.

Each month, Rubin picks a theme related to home (in the broadest sense) and sets herself some resolutions. She kicks off with "Possessions".  One of the most unsettling things about moving was being confronted with all our stuff - every single thing needed attention - and it made me just want to chuck it all out.  The usual comeback to a comment like this is that, yes, you should get rid of stuff, strive for simplicity, etc etc. Rubin argues we shouldn't just strive for less for the sake of having less, and assuming that less is better. She says instead we should just make sure we are engaging with our stuff - either by using it or keeping it because it has some special significance.

Next up is Marriage month.  One of the things Rubin talks about here is an attempt to rebalance who does the driving. Her husband basically does all of it, and she avoids it.  This is one of my own weaknesses too, and I read this chapter with hope, but it turns out there are no quick fixes for this.  Her sister offers the most helpful bit of wisdom here - that she'll only stop feeling anxious about driving after she has been driving every day for years.

Parenthood was the next theme, and I decided straight away to copy one of her resolutions to "under react to a problem".  Making a conscious effort to stay calm definitely makes a difference, but it takes practice.

A couple of months later Rubin focuses on Time.  She throws in a quote from Thoreau which inspired her:

"I love a broad margin to my life"

Isn't it such a luxury not to have to rush? In this chapter Rubin talks about planning her time better. She talks about everything from managing always-on technology and relentless emails, to how much she accomplished by doing something 15 minutes a day, to her kids' after school activities.  Her "15 minutes a day" task was sorting out her digital photos.  Some of her zeal for this rubbed off on me and I started tackling mine too. I also made a mental note to read Samuel Johnson, who is glowingly discussed in this chapter.

After the chapters on Body and Family is a chapter on Neighbourhood.  Here Rubin resolves to "be a tourist without leaving home" by making more effort to appreciate and enjoy what her city has to offer.  Another resolution this month was to "practice nonrandom acts of kindness".  Rubin disagrees with the notion that random acts of kindness bring happiness to the giver and the receiver (who she thinks will usually react with suspicion to a random act of kindness directed at them).  The nonrandom acts of kindness that Rubin focuses on include inviting new people to her reading and writing groups, recommending people for work and linking to other people's blogs. I smiled when I read this as this blog has been a lucky recipient of one of Rubin's nonrandom acts of kindness - she posted about this blog on twitter! - and it made my day!

Towards the end of the book, I highlighted this - which sounds so simple but is so insightful:

"...my quest perfectly illustrated one of my Secrets of Adulthood: I do best what comes naturally. When I pursue a goal that's right for me, my progress comes quickly and easily; when I pursue a goal that's wrong for me, my progress feels blocked. Now I try not to fight that sense of paralysis, but rather see it as a helpful clue to self-knowledge."

And, speaking of her Secrets of Adulthood (of which there are many) - this is one of my new favourites:

"It's the task that's never started that's the most wearisome"  

The final chapter, Now, brings it all together as Rubin reflects on her months of resolutions.  I won't spoil the ending except to say that it's happy and quite lovely.

You can find out more about Gretchen Rubin and her books and read her blog at www.gretchenrubin.com

The Architecture of Happiness

The last few weeks have been spent trying to adjust to life in a new home. For the last 3  years we lived in a lovely 2 bedroom apartment within walking distance of everything we needed to get to.  We were complimented on it often and I guess we felt quite house proud - not least because it was the first home we ever owned.  But with 2 small kids we'd grown out of it and desperately needed some more (especially outdoor) space.

We've moved about one mile away to the suburbs (where nothing is within walking distance) to an unrenovated 1950s house with a dodgy green carpet and a big back garden for the kids.  We're renting this place so we just have to accept it as it is.  This whole experience has made me wonder about how much our sense of identity is wrapped up in where we live - both what our homes are like and where they are.

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton gave me some insight into that.  Early on in the book he says,

"Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or worse, different people in different places - and on the conviction that it is architecture's task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be."

Instead of proudly showing people around, as we did in our old place, my husband and I have been the first to make jokes about the decor and apologise for the horrible bathroom. It's like we're saying - this isn't really us! Don't judge us! But of course our friends couldn't care less about these things. Now that we've been here for a while though I don't care about them either.

The Architecture of Happiness is quite wide ranging in the topics it covers, and although I generally love most of what Alain de Botton writes I find I have to be in the mood for it. This book felt a bit too dense to be tackling in the middle of this busy patch - however, there was a great chapter on "Ideals of Home" which I paid close attention to.  One of my favourite passages was about the meaning of home:

"To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song...We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us." 

I also liked this passage, which highlights the idea of home as a sanctuary where we can be our true selves (although his comments about work are very amusingly cynical).

"Our working routines may be frantic and compromised, dense with meetings, insincere handshakes, small-talk and bureaucracy. We may say things we don't believe in to win over our colleagues and feel ourselves becoming envious and excited in relation to goals we don't essentially care for.  

But finally, on our own, looking out of the hall window into the garden and the gathering darkness, we can slowly resume contact with a more authentic self, who was there waiting in the wings for us to end our performance."

In this same chapter on the Ideals of Home, de Botton also talks about what's in our homes.  He makes some interesting arguments about what drives our taste in art, furniture and interior design, and why our tastes change or, as he asks,  "Why do we change our minds about what we find beautiful?"

He argues that "a given stylistic choice will tell us as much about what its advocates lack as about what they like".  He says that in the late 18th Century in the West, there was an increase in popularity of "the natural" in all major art forms and he explains "They were falling in love with the natural in their art precisely because they were losing touch with the natural in their own lives".

On why our tastes change, he says:

"As the ways in which we are unbalanced alters, so our attention will continue to be drawn to new parts of the spectrum of taste, to new styles which we will declare beautiful on the basis that they embody in a concentrated form what now lies in shadow within us."

As I look around our new home and see all our treasured possessions in new places, our pieces of furniture in new rooms, our art and photos on the walls, I think about how much we love all this stuff. I've never thought about why I love the things I love in my home, or why we chose the things we did, but maybe he's right and these choices reveal some deep truths about what's lacking somewhere in life? I wonder... 

How to Worry Less About Money

"How to Worry Less About Money" by John Armstrong is another book in the School of Life series.  It is a really great (and short) book which gave me a completely different perspective on money, my thoughts about it and what I spend it on.  The author offers a very refreshing and honest insight into his own money worries and how he has learnt to process them constructively.  In his own words, the book is about

"how we can bring imagination, self-knowledge, emotional maturity, and our big ideas about life and society, into the way we engage with money."

Armstrong kicks off by explaining that money worries aren't the same as money troubles (i.e. not being able to pay your bills).  He says worries are connected to imagination and the emotions, not just to what is happening here and now. Instead of simply asking how can I get more money or manage with less money, we should be asking how much money do we need and what do we need it for.

He argues that money worries are just other worries disguised as money worries, and urges us to think more deeply about the underlying cause of our worries. He illustrates this by talking about his car, which makes him feel anxious about money. He's worried that it's starting to get a bit rough round the edges, needs various repairs, isn't as fancy as other people's cars at the tennis club, and he can't afford to replace it. He digs into this a bit deeper and concedes that what he's really worried about not taking care of things properly. He's worried about his character, and buying a new car isn't going to change this, it will not make him better at looking after it.

Although I don't worry about financial security I do think about money a lot, mostly because I worry about the prices of things and I generally feel guilty if I spend a lot of money on something. I should probably spend some time thinking about what it is that I'm really worried about...

Armstrong makes some great comments about worrying (which I know I do quite a lot):

"Worry is a name for mental effort: ideally one wants to worry more insightfully and more purposefully. The aim of adult life, one might say, is to worry well. We worry about things that matter; worry implies care."

He talks about money as a medium of exchange and reminds us that almost anything can be turned into money, and money can be turned into anything.  We need to think about how we make money, and what possessions and activities we turn our money into. It's a mistake to think that the means are the ends, and that the medium of exchange is a "real thing". He argues we should think about money's relationship with flourishing (rather than happiness).

"Money brings about good consequences - helps us live valuable lives - only when joined with 'virtues'. Virtues are good abilities of mind and character."

I found his thoughts on Need versus Want really interesting.  He argues that needs are not necessarily just basic food, shelter, or the cheapest thing.  What we view as a "need" depends on what's important to us.  This is what he says:

"Need is deeper - bound up with the serious narrative of one's life. 'Do I need this?' is a way of asking: how important is this thing, how central is it to my becoming a good version of myself; what is it actually for in my life? This interrogation is designed to distinguish needs from mere wants."

He gives as an example a fine violinist who needs a very expensive bow, because this bow has a central role to play in this person's life.

He also looks at price versus value, and he says something here that made me think of the pursuit of material things that I talked about in the Status Anxiety post recently.  He talks about something inexpensive that he bought and collected over time, that he said he gets "a reliable, everyday thrill from using."

The pleasure we get from our possessions can be very real - I asked my husband to list his favourite things and he said our collection of photos and art, his guitar, and his surfboards.

When I was early in my career living in London I lusted after, and then after some encouragement from my flatmate Suzanne, eventually bought, a gold trench coat. It was GBP250 and the most expensive item of clothing I had ever bought. I loved wearing it so much, I used to joke to Suzanne that wearing it made me feel like a better person.  I have photos from a girls' weekend in Paris of me wearing that coat and it makes me so happy to see it (and remember the weekend of course).  The flip side of clothes shopping (which I do much less nowadays, and enjoy it far less than I did when I was younger), is impulse buying, bargain shopping (especially on the internet), basically buying for the sake of it. Most of the time this gives me a very short lived shopper's high, then a week later I forget I've even bought it. I hate this type of shopping and I want to try to cut it out.  

After reading this book, I want to spend money in a more mindful way, buy things that we'll treasure, that will last, that will give us a reliable, everyday thrill or allow us to flourish.  As Armstrong says, we have to look into ourselves and think what money means to us, not simply try to maximise the amount we have.

On expectations

I've been thinking about expectations after the Huffington Post article I wrote about last week. (The equation it talks about, that Happiness = Reality - Expectations, was written in the context of Gen Y's hopes about work).  I have also been re-reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. One of the first chapters - on the causes of status anxiety - is on expectations.  In this chapter he explains that our assessment of our own status is relative to the people we are comparing ourselves to (and measuring ourselves against).  This is what he says:

"Our judgement of what constitutes an appropriate limit on anything - for example, on wealth or esteem - is never arrived at independently; instead, we make such determinations by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, a set of people who we believe resemble us."

This idea of a reference group came up in the same Gen Y article, and in another article I read on the UK Telegraph website last week, ("There's much more to life than being top of the class"). It was about some research released by the London School of Economics that argued it's not always better to send your child to a "good" school instead of an average one.  In "good" schools, where children achieve better results, it's harder for average children to keep up, which negatively impacts their performance and their self confidence.  I think this is just saying - think about where your child ranks and tamper with the reference group so that you can get your child as near to the top (or furthest from the bottom) of that group as possible - which will make them feel good about themselves. It's such a narrow view of education and achievement though isn't it?      

While we're on the topic of school and expectations, I found this video on youtube called "10 Expectations".  It turns the whole thing about expectations at school on its head...instead of focusing on expectations about student achievement (measured solely by exam results) it talks about expectations that students have about school.  At its core, it breaks down the division between school and work/life, and asks how school can enrich the student, support the development of their interests and make them relevant to the real world.  It reminded me of the comments Thoreau made about learning in Walden Pond.  How likely is it that these 10 expectations will be realised? Or are they just hopes and wishes? They sound like what I would choose for my kids' education, in an ideal world.

Stop feeling bad...about email and disappointment

I am taking a break from writing about Walden Pond (which could give me enough material to write about for weeks) to talk about two things I saw on the internet last week.  They are both kind of related because they are about things that make people "feel bad" which is one of the pillars in the First Splendid Truth about happiness that Gretchen Rubin writes about in The Happiness Project. 

One thing that makes me feel bad is email. An out of control inbox and an overly complicated email filing system that makes it take forever to file things, then almost impossible to remember which folder I put things in once I've filed them.  My salvation came from an article on the Financial Times website last week called Ten Email Commandments written by Tim Harford.  In a very funny, well observed article, one of the commandments is to stop filing emails!  Just dump them all in an archive folder. He even cites academic research supporting the efficiency of this! So I have stopped filing emails this week for the first time ever and it's made such a difference already. No more procrastination about where to put things. No more time wasted!

The other was an article from the Huffington post: Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy. The article argues (via some funny drawings) that happiness (or unhappiness) results from reality being better (or worse) than your expectations and looks at this in the context of work.  It also talks about the role of Facebook in warping people's expectations, which is pretty fascinating really. It's worth a read (thanks Sarah for sending it to me!).