Get 2014 off to a positive start with Gretchen Rubin on Wednesday, January 8. She will speak at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue on Happier at Home — a follow-up to her 2011 bestseller The Happiness Project — newly out on paperback (Three Rivers Press, $15).
While The Happiness Project explored how to heighten happiness in general aspects of life, Happier at Home (subtitled “Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life”) focuses on that important place where your day begins and ends. Rubin launches a new “happiness project” that coincides with her daughters’ school year, from September to May, in order to increase her sense of happiness and appreciation. She again tackles small resolutions within one theme each month, this time all tied to home.
Why home? No matter where you live, home is our “foundation,” Rubin writes. “Behind our unremarkable front door waits the little world of our own making, a place of safety, exploration, comfort, and love.” And rather than finding happiness through exciting adventures, the author “aimed to find more happiness within [her] daily routine” in ways that others can apply themselves.
Some of her monthly themes included possessions, marriage, time, body, and neighborhood, but she encourages readers to modify their projects as they see fit. She began with possessions in hopes to “feel more in control of stuff” that can weigh us down. But she doesn’t rush to classify stuff as materialistic, and quotes psychologist Carl Jung: “We need to project ourselves into the things around us. My self is not contained to my body. It extends into all the things I have made and all the things around me.”
Rubin’s funny, self-aware tone is like that of a friend, rather than a Pollyanna on opiates. She notes that when she began happiness projects, she wondered if they were selfish endeavors. But as she theorized when first defining happiness, “One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy; one of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.”
Plus, she holds herself accountable using a chart methodology tried and tested by Benjamin Franklin, in his pursuit of “moral perfection.” Just something else to work on after turning your home into a happiness oasis.
Doors open at 6 p.m. and the event begins at 7 p.m. Tickets must be purchased online and are $15 for a ticket only, $20 for a ticket and a book, and $30 for two tickets and a book.
