August and September, sort of like January, always seem to bring an uptick of articles about how to be more productive and happy. There are studies and Listicles and advice columns. There are pictures of happy smiling people who have got their lives in order, beckoning the reader to be like them, to stop laying around on the couch and make that one single easy change that will bring total happiness.
I can never help myself from clicking on these links. My will power carries me past the dancing dressed up singing kitten and you’ll never know what happened next, past the life changing political show stopping news, past all the food videos (well, some of them), but all my stern self control evaporates away in the hazy promise of happiness.
I mean, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? What rich successful brilliant people do before breakfast that makes them better than me as I drag on my sweat pants and trudge up and down the stairs, doing another load of laundry. One hundred executives were polled (I’m summarizing the internet here) and they all OHIO’ed (only handled it once), they never said anything negative to themselves, and they threw away all their belongings and wore the same thing every day. And they were, I mean are, get this, happy. Nothing bad ever happened to them ever again.
The best one was yesterday. Only it wasn’t a rich person. It was the usual minimalist mother who evaluated her life, saw that all her unhappiness and stress was because she owned things, made the life changing decision to throw everything away, and, for real, claimed at the end that she has never again experienced any sadness or stress. I won’t link her because I didn’t save it. I was to busy moving my own piles of stuff around my house, weeping gently into my tea pot. Turns out, and you would never have guessed this, after getting her own life together she was able to turn around and become a life coach for others, helping them never to be unhappy ever again.
The thing is, even as I slap paint around with a wide and negatively generalizing brush, the reason I am always suckered in by these studies and Listicles is because sometimes they have had some small kernel of truth or help. The year I read that I should Only Handle It Once and actually did it was a pretty great interlude. I emailed everyone back in a timely fashion. I wasn’t apologizing to every single person every single minute. I was kind of on top of that aspect of my life and felt pretty great about it. Except that honestly, you can’t Only Handle It Once all the time forever. Sometimes, as other Listicles will tell you, you have to set aside only one time of the day to answer email, but sometimes you have to click on it the moment it comes in to make sure it’s not urgent, and then all your future happiness is blown forever out of the water.
Where is the meeting point between an ordered disciplined life, where you do things and get somewhere, and the messy reality that even if you get all your life together and ascend to the mountain of true success, happiness will ever yet be elusive? I was stuck in the doctor’s office this week without a book which turned out to be fine because the tv was as loud as a parish hall during VBS. I wouldn’t have been able to read and would have been angry. I lay back in the big plush chair and watched five women around a table try to be interesting. Talk about failure. There was a clip of some famous singer, who I had never heard of, giving tips for how to be confident in life. Know that you’re beautiful, she said. Don’t let any negative thing be said anywhere around you, she said. And put yourself first, she said. The clip faded off into the virtual universe and the ladies took up the task of making this ridiculous advice appear reasonable. One of them helplessly admitted that if the externals of her life are going badly, she just can’t feel confident. Another said she has to wake up before everyone else in her household. A third thought maybe being confident means embracing imperfection. I smiled a wry smile and felt sad for all of them.
I mean, not because I’m happy, or blindingly successful, but because when you have hooked your life to the sorrowing failure of the crucified Jesus, even after you have read all the articles and tried all the stuff, you aren’t any more looking down the gaping black abyss of a temporary illusive happiness. You don’t Have to be happy. You don’t Have to be successful. You can fail and be miserable and that’s fine because God can still welcome you into his enteral and unfailing light. The gospel makes room not only for human failure, but for frailty, for a rest from the striving.
And now I will go have a whack at my email again.
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