My Year Of Everything

Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project” was kind of the perfect book to read right now. I’ve pulled myself out of my hiatus funk, I’m within a week of starting rehearsals for “The Strip,” I’m keeping myself busier and feeling better. And then I pick up this book and read this quote from Yeats on page 66: “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” Word, William Butler Yeats. Word. 

The book is an account of the yearful of things Rubin did to grow and therefore get happier, and it turns out I’ve been doing most of them myself as part of my own project. I’m already thinking like a published My Year Of author! 

Here are a few. Do them yourself, and be hap-hap-happy like me and Gretchen Rubin:

Write down a list of resolutions. Not goals, though those are important, too. Rubin defines “goals” as one-time accomplishments, “resolutions” as daily guidelines. For me, the marathon was a goal, but it was part of a larger resolution to push myself harder physically. I can’t keep doing marathons every day (like my doppelganger did), but I can keep getting healthier. Write down a list of things you want to do every day, and post it somewhere you can’t miss it. I’ll put mine up on Gretchen’s site later today. Don’t steal mine, because that’s just wrong. (Screen name: Myyearofeverything.)

Do some goofy thing you love, because you’re probably not the only one who loves this goofy thing. Rubin comes out of the closet as a lover of children’s fiction, and finds that a bunch of her hifalutin big-city friends love it too, so she starts a children’s fiction book club. I like running and beer, and wondered how they’d mix- then my friend Dave Park got some folks together for “hashing” last Sunday. Good times! Other people who love what you love are sometimes just like you, so go find them. (Not recommended if you love comic books or porn.)

Ask yourself what the younger version of yourself loved, and seek that thing out again. This is weird, because I JUST had this revelation: 14-year-old Dave would have gone bananas if he could have listened to British radio stations right in his own room. So I’ve started reading the BBC.co.uk “Chart Blog,” and listening to the stream of Radio One. And I’ll be damned if it didn’t wake up the enthusiastic teen within.

It’s easy to shit on everything, it’s hard to be enthusiastic. Every now and then, UCB does a show called “The Dirtiest Sketch In Town.” People submit filthy sketches, and they put up a few and the audience picks a winner. Great, that’s fine, but isn’t that kind of easy? Wouldn’t it be harder to do the opposite? Wouldn’t it be more challenging to ask people to write a really nice sketch, a sketch that is heartwarming? Doesn’t the very thought of that make you ask yourself a lot of questions? And when you hear “dirty sketches,” isn’t the only question “How much fake semen will I have to look at?” That’s what Rob Delaney and I wanted to know a year or so ago, so we put up a show called “The Nicest Sketch In The Whole World.” And it was great. We did the sequel last weekend (Delaney was rocking SXSW, so I co-hosted with the wonderful Judith Shelton.) It was DELIGHTFUL. We’ll be doing it again before the end of the year. Get to work. 

Do something every day. I try to do this every day, and I’m not always successful, but I feel best when I am. Gretchen gets involved in a “novel writing month,” in which she writes 1,667 words every single day and emerges with a 50,000-word book. I may have to take that on. But find yourself some activity, something where growth or product can be measured, and just do it. Don’t judge it, don’t rate it, just DO it. To be is to do, so get out there and be as much as you can.