Issue No. 4: The Eye

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I think of this quote every year during the holidays. Unhappy families are so complex, fractured and glittering like broken glass. Happy ones, in contrast, seem so simple.

Perhaps it’s because happy people are simple: Happy people are kind. They listen well. They are generous with time and money. They are grateful for what they have rather than bitter for what they lack. They aren’t martyrs, but they aren’t selfish either; they’re too absorbed with hobbies (gardening, reading, whittling, walking) or companionship (friends, marriage, neighborhood soccer teams) to think about themselves much anyway. They usually sleep well, laugh often, and move their bodies. When they smile, you feel it in your belly. A little piece of them is transferred to you with that smile; happiness tends to overflow.

Tolstoy’s 19th century observation about happiness—that it is somehow repeatable, identical, and unvaried—jives with 21st century pop psychology. Studies on happiness are endless and yet redundant, reaching the same conclusions again and again. (Health, generosity, and gratitude.)

I’ve always thought of “happiness” (at least the way our consumerist culture defines it) as a trivial pursuit, a carrot hanging on a just-out-of-reach stick designed to keep us endlessly shopping. (Did Black Friday sales really make anyone happy?) But with the birth of my daughter, I began to see it differently. Happiness, or call it contentment, or satisfaction, was no longer trivial at all.

In the early weeks after giving birth, I felt emotions I’d never really experienced before: exhaustion, frustration, sadness, irritation, physical pain. (If you’ve pumped breastmilk at 1:00 a.m., fed a crying baby at 2:00 a.m., and emptied the dishwasher at 3:00 a.m. for clean bottles only to repeat steps one and two at 4:00 a.m., you know what I mean.) I’d been a mostly a happy person for 27 years—I’d never not been able to cheer myself up before. What had happened? And how could I fix it?

If I wanted my daughter to grow up in one of Tolstoy’s happy families, I’d have to find a way to be happy myself. I’d have to take my own emotional wellbeing seriously.

I would never want my daughter to look around her dinner table and worry about her parents’ moods, to spend her meals analyzing, strategizing, intuiting, or soothing adult emotions. I want our daughter to feel safe in her family to the point of boredom. In a family, by proximity, my happiness matters tremendously. My responsibility to care for my daughter is really a responsibility to care for myself.

And so, with a six-week old baby tucked under my arm, I began investigating my own happiness, starting at ground zero, bringing back a field report on what I learned. Unfortunately, you will find nothing new here, only a re-assertion of what everyone else says is true. The platitudes are all correct. Happiness is simple, and, sometimes, it is still difficult. There’s no shame in using a map to find the road home.

1. Start with the body

We are bodies, flesh and blood. That means we need to eat, sleep, and get a little sunshine. This is not optional. I started feeling immensely better when I prioritized my body. I ate more food, ordered pre-prepared meals to my house (something I’ve previously argued against) and made sure to go outside once a day. The baby started sleeping longer stretches, and so did I. Sleep is how the body repairs itself—you literally can’t function without it. Our culture fixates on “wellness”—selling us skincare products, fad diets, and powdery supplements—and then encourages us to chug coffee, watch Netflix until 11 p.m., and order pizza for dinner on Uber Eats. We completely miss the point. What if we tended to our bodies kindly, with gentleness? As Haruki Murakami writes, “an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body.”

2. Nothing lasts forever

It’s natural to expect happiness in our lives, but it’s a mistake to expect continuous happiness. Why should every day be perfect? For some reason we assume it will be. We wake up every morning expecting pleasantness, expecting traffic to clear for us, expecting the world to serve us something delicious for breakfast. We are left uniquely unprepared when hardship arrives.

That’s a shame, because everything good in life—resiliency, strength, courage, love—is won through hardship. Happiness is not about avoiding suffering, but about suffering well. As St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, people living in a luxuriant culture much like our own, “[we should] rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.”

It helps to remember that no suffering is continuous, either. The clouds pass. The rain clears. The baby eventually sleeps. Life moves on.

3. Change your own mind

One of my favorite things about reading a good novel is losing track of myself. While I read, the author takes the wheel, and I am simply a passenger in her car. Once the baby started sleeping a bit, I had time to read again, and I was struck by how delightfully healing it is to forget yourself for a while—to experience the author’s emotions rather than your own. Reading a love story made me feel romantic again, reading a memoir stirred me to be ambitious.

When you engage with art—a book, a painting, a song—you loosen the grip on yourself and become open to change. You become malleable. You give the art a chance to work within you. George Saunders calls this idea “alteration”: “You come in in one state,” he says, “and you go out in another.” Art gives us this gift free of charge. (A long phone call with a friend does too.) We’d be remiss not to use it.

4. Use your good eye

There is a phrase in Rabbinic tradition, “ayin tovah,” which means to “have a good eye.” The opposite is “ayin ra’ah,” which means to “have a bad eye.” A person with a good eye chooses to see the world positively, from a perspective of abundance, mercy, and grace. A person with a bad eye chooses to see scarcity, brokenness, and fear.

I like this phrase—the emphasis on the eye—because it’s a reminder that what you look for you will certainly find. Look for the bad, and you will find plenty. But if you look for the good, you can find that too. As Oprah once wrote about her 30-year-long gratitude journal habit, “I went through the day looking for things to be grateful for, and something always showed up.”

Once I started searching for goodness I found it everywhere: in the sunlight, the breeze, the little breaths in my daughter’s lungs. The food in my fridge, the blanket wrapped around my feet. The eye is like any part of the body—it gets stronger the more you use it.

Gratitude invigorates our lives with goodness. It’s where we end, and where we must always begin.

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