Pick and Choose

I spend a lot of time every day asking myself questions.

Do I really want that croissant?  Will I still be able to button my pants if I eat that croissant?  What is going to happen with Ebola?  If I am going to die of Ebola anyway, why not just eat the stupid croissant?

Etc.

This type of internal dialogue is what gets me through the day. I have perfected my, "Oh, of course I'm paying attention to what your saying. You are so INTERESTING. Please go on." face so that I can happily talk to myself inside my head while people are blathering on about....well, frankly I have no idea what.

Lately, my internal questions have been focused around happiness (hence all the french pastry references).  The two questions that have kept me wondering are points I think it is important for everyone to consider:

How many things do you do every day because you feel like you have to?

How would your life be different if you focused on doing only the things you wanted to?

I do lots of things every day because I feel like I have to.  Wake up and go to work. Put on pants that do not allow me to plow an endless stream of croissants into my face. Act friendly moderately friendly tolerant towards people I do not enjoy speaking to. Save money.  Research health insurance options. Drink water instead of vodka soda coffee. Some of these things are important in the long run. Some, I am coming to realize, are simply an excuse to remain in a whirlpool state of moderate dissatisfaction.

"Oh, of course I'm not that happy.  I have to (fill in this blank with some annoying activity) every day/week/month/whatever."  

In considering this conundrum, I have reached the following ideal:  

I would like to be happy, immediately in-the-moment happy, 80% of the time.  Even at work. Even talking to people I don't enjoy. Even if I'm tired. 

The other 20% I will be satisfied participating in activities that I believe have the potential to make me happy in the future (actively attempting not to lose my job, picking a good health care package, collecting my birth control pills thyroid medication from the pharmacy, etc)

This may take some life tailoring.

Step 1:  Actively consider the activities that make me unhappy. For me, this is anything that causes stress.  Measure their importance and the amount of time spent on these activities.

Step 2: Actively consider the activities that make me happy. For me, this may involve reading books, resting and (gasp) having fun at work with the 100 students I teach every day.  Instead of making them think life is a series of serious, boring meetings.  (Which, side note, if you're not careful, it is.)

Step 3: Organize my time so I spend more of my day on the things that make me happy. "Work smarter" as they say, and get unpleasant things over with quickly.

Step 4: Reassess.  Are the activities I picked causing me long term happiness?  Is there stress from anything I am leaving undone?

In celebration of the fall, I am going to embark on this little experiment.  The 80% experiment. Deep breath (because they make me happy, duh). Wish me luck. 

Always Be Nice

...even when you don't like the person you are talking to.  Even when you're bored and hungry and late for something.  Even when the November doldrums set in and instead of being nice you are just desperately trying to get from one cup of vodka wine coffee tea...yeah...tea to the next without losing your mind. Why, you ask?  Well, funny enough I have been asking myself the same thing lately (the above scenarios are not simply a matter of blog-land fiction).  Here's why I think it's important to be nice:

1. It's good for your blood pressure. When I am having a pleasant conversation with someone, I notice my breathing slow down and my whole body relax.  When I am annoyed, I tense up and get all squinty-eyed like a feral cat (not a good look--in addition to high blood pressure, it gives me meanness bags around my eyes that no Chanel cream can wipe away).

2. It's attractive to be nice.  People notice how you behave.  If you are smiling and being friendly, even though you would rather be ripping your toenails out with a dull knife than listening patiently to some idiot explain (insert dim, obtuse topic here), people want to talk to you.  OTHER people. Interesting, possibly cute/rich/intellectually stimulating single men type people.  So smile and look attentive for 5 minutes.

3. Nice is fabulous.  The goal is to be fabulous.  Mean is kryptonite, the anti-fabulous, the wrinkly, bitter, haggard older sister of fabulous that people simply tolerate.  Everyone wants to be around nice people. And one day you might stop being such a b*tch and decide you want some more friends. So suck it up and stop being so condescending.

More advice on HOW to be nice (EVEN in winter, EVEN when hungover, EVEN when the salesperson at H&M won't let you bring all your damn clothes in the fitting room) are coming soon. Stay tuned! 

Passion vs. Busy-ness

Tim Kreider recently wrote an opinion piece for the NY Times titled "The Busy Trap".  If you are too lazy to click the link (or if you clicked the link but got distracted by the Prada handbag Scientific American popup ads...), you can read my summary below:

People create busy-ness for themselves.  Busyness is an annoying, distracted state that allows people to focus on being annoyed and distracted instead of processing any real information or real life experiences.  Mr. Kreider makes a particularly striking and beautiful point about feeling like he has to shout over the self-imposed hysteria of "busy-ness" in order to make simple plans with friends.

The idea of busy-ness taking the place of real experiences resonates with me as a stressed, type A New Yorker in a tremendous way.  I recently moved across the ocean to escape the busy New York life style and, guess what?  The lifestyle followed me to Spain! I've become so accustomed to filling up my days with activities that I continued on the same trend almost immediately the second I set foot on European soil.



Here's the problem: It's easy to be busy.  It's difficult to be SATISFIED with your life and feel you are pursuing worthwhile activities. Fulfillment does not come from filling up the hours on your calendar. Fulfillment comes from enjoying the activities you pursue both personally and professionally.



I have made a decision to stop seeking out busy-ness and start seeking PASSION. Basically it was either that or grind my teeth into dust trying to keep up with an impossible schedule.  I had a flash of blinding inspiration and realized I quite like my teeth, so getting out of the stress-ocean of busy-ness was the logical choice. Mediterranean Sea of Passion, here I come....


To start seeking passion, I have a 3-step plan (In my defense, I cut it down from 5 to 3 in the interest of distillation and "un-busy-ness")

1. Slow down.  It is important to breathe.  Every minute of every day.  It is difficult to breathe when you are simultamously e-mailing, texting, eating a snack, drinking a coffee, booking a flight to Brussels, crossing items off a to-do list and talking on the phone.  I am going to focus on doing one thing at a time and doing it SLOWLY in order to enjoy my e-mail/text/coffee/sense of satisfaction with my to-do list.

2.  Pick and Choose.  In our world of continuous, endless streams of information, it becomes continually more difficult to prioritize.  Just because an activity is listed on the internet, or a new recipe comes up on glamour.com NYTimes Cooking Blog, doesn't mean I need to participate.  I have activities and routines I enjoy (and it took a long time to figure out what they are).  I want to let everything else go and focus on the things that make me happy.  This step may be pretty intense, because picking and choosing the things that make me happy mean I need to alter my lifestyle.  There will certainly be more written about Step 2 as I have time to reflect (see below).

3. Reflect.  The power of reflection is part of the beauty of life.  It is that quiet time when deep, surprising connections are made.  It's important for the brain and the spirit. It is the essence of the Mediterranean Sea of passion.  Just sit and look and clear your mind....everything else can wait.

Multiple Intelligences

For those of you not lucky enough to be high school teachers or possibly work in human resources, you may not be aware of Professor Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner, a long-time Harvard professor, applied his his ivy league mind in the early 1980's to describing what exactly it is that makes people successful at being human beings (noting perhaps, that even at Harvard there were "smart" people that were not able to communicate or "poor" people that were somehow able to pass the admissions testing...etc). His efforts are summarized below:

Obviously, it seems possible from reading skimming this information that there is one more than one a person can present themselves as intelligent.  Educators generally use this information to create lessons that appeal to a large variety of different types of learners. A student who is not interested in reading a passage may be interested in drawing about it, your children may not have ADHD HSD ASTMS, etc, they may simply excel in a type of intelligence that is not measured with normal school testing (but if they have trouble concentrating in school before age 3 you should obviously still get them tested for heavy medication, otherwise what will you talk about with the other parents?). 

What type of intelligence do you think you excel in?  It's interesting that after reading this list, a person can often suffer through a few minutes of introspection and classify themselves better in regard to their intellectual strengths and how they learn.  

You can also take this quiz to help yourself along with your assessment.