I was thinking, the other day, about when I feel truly happy. There's those fleeting feelings of sensory happiness--the involuntary smile when I taste something really delicious, or when a good song comes on the radio. And those are genuine happiness, but they're short-lived. But one thing that really makes me happy, an enduring satisfied feeling, is being productive. It's not just the feeling of success, or accomplishing something, although those cause happiness too. Just the indisputable knowledge that what I'm doing is leading me in the right direction. Put as simply as possible, I'm happiest at those rare times when I want to do happens to coincide with what I know I ought to be doing.
And the good thing, I guess, is that I'm starting to realize one or both of those factors can usually be changed in order to foster happiness. Like when I was doing an Honors thesis--I never ever wanted to work on it. I knew I needed to, but I because anxious and miserable and even the idea of it. It was becoming more and more clear to me that I was not going to go to grad school for history, and it was so unappealing. But I was so sure I had to finish it, so whenever I was doing something else (which was all the time), I felt guilty and miserable because I knew I needed to work on my thesis.
Then, a lightbulb: I realized that I didn't have to finish the thesis, and it was such a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders. I discovered that the thesis wasn't really that conducive to my long-term goals, so I quit it. But other tasks that I don't really enjoy are sometimes necessary, so I have to do them. In that case, in order to make myself happier, I need to either a) find a way to make them more appealing, or b) do them as soon as possible, as quickly as possible, and not let them weigh on me. This is how I used to feel about lesson planning. For my entire first year in Korea, I hated lesson planning. I loved delivering the lessons I'd planned, and teaching, so obviously this was something I would just have to work around. I always put off the planning until the last minute, and was miserable when I did it. Thus, I was always finishing things up at 1am or 10 minutes before class, which was stressful, and even worse, I didn't enjoy myself for the preceding evening while I was with friends, because I felt guilty about putting it off.
A big part of this, I know, is just my propensity for procrastination, which is something I tackled at the same time. At the beginning of my second year in Korea, I vowed that I would stop procrastinating, specifically on lesson planning. I had an average of 4 free hours at school each day, but because I hated lesson planning, I would do anything to avoid it, which was so much time wasted. Instead, I vowed to only lesson plan at school, because I had more than enough time, so that it would never be hanging over me after I left work. And to my own surprise, I actually did it. Sure I still didn't enjoy it very much, but two things helped: 1) I had honed my skills and now it took me less time, and 2) I was doing it in the most favorable conditions, when there weren't really other things to do that were much more fun, and I knew that doing it now meant I wouldn't have to worry about it later. So I'm at least satisfied a lot more often at school, because I'm able to enjoy what I should be doing.---
Speaking of happiness, lately I've started reading a lot more, and it really is making my life better. It's as if in the past few years I'd somehow forgotten what I always loved about reading, and saw it more as a chore than an enjoyable pastime. I've also always loved movies, but in the past few months I've started to become a TV watcher, which I consider a huge waste of time. Part of the problem, I think, is that for the past year I've been reading books that were just bad. Korea gave me a lot of time to read, as it was one of the few ways I could amuse myself in my own language, but all I had was the dregs. I bought books I genuinely was interested in every once in awhile, but mostly I just read a mishmash of things I picked up and borrowed, and it stopped being enjoyable. But lately I've read a slew of really amazing books, and I remember what a sheer joy it can be to spend a whole day with a book.
Reading is, for me, the perfect hobby, because it often fills the criteria for happiness that I just laid out. It's an enjoyable hobby, but it's also edifying. Especially because I'm an English teacher and a writer, I can, without stretching, feel like I'm doing some sort of professional development--feel productive while doing something I enjoy. And since Tim inspired me to start reading non-fiction, my apprecation of reading has expanded even more. I love good stories, and believe without question that we can learn a lot from them, but there's something different you can get from non-fiction. I'm experiencing a personal renaissance with the classics lately, and have just been thinking a lot about why I think reading is so vital to human growth. And finally, (with the help of more reading!), I'm finding the words to articulate it:
Reading, better than any other medium, exposes you to the stories, experiences, and opinions of a wide variety of people, many of whom are wiser than you. When a non-reader attempts to answer the great questions of how to live life, or faces a problem, who can he turn to for help? His family, from whom he may have consciously or unconsciously gleaned many of his beliefs, or his friends, who often have the same level of experience and wisdom as him. Oh, and sitcoms.
A reader, on the other hand, has access to, quite literally, the wisdom of the ages. Alain de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy has been revolutionary for me because he does a great job of showing that philosophy offers much more than pie-in-the-sky abstractions, which is what I previously thought. These great thinkers have offered some real, concrete advice on how to live a good life and deal with troubles. And reading is the only way to access the ideas and thoughts of anyone born before the twentieth century. Do I seem to have an overinflated sense of the importance and usefulness of the past? I guess it's just because I'm also a historian.
So unlike watching television and using Facebook, when I read, especially non-fiction, I actually feel like I'm improving myself. I don't feel guilty, as I do when I feel like I'm wasting time, or when I know I ought to be doing something else. It's enjoyable and productive--my perfect recipe for happiness.
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