How to Build a Happy Life
“The main thing in one’s life is to try to laugh as much as you cry”
— Maya Angelou
A few years ago on NPR’s Fresh Air podcast, I heard an author named Mary Pipher being interviewed by Terry Gross. Her words were so compelling that I had to stop what I was doing while listening to take notes. Pipher was on the shown to promote her book called ‘Women Rowing North’, which chronicles the positive aspects of transitioning from middle age to old age. Her basic finding is that older women are often the happiest demographic in America. The 71 year old author also finds that women her age experience more joy and bliss than younger women. Big statements.
Pipher is a former therapist and best selling author. She draws from her life, her friends’ lives, decades worth of work as a therapist and the numerous interviews she did while writing her most recent book to support her claims. I’m not really here to debate if her claim is true or not. I’m way more interested in the consistencies in life choices that lead to the happiness in the women she interviewed. What can we learn from these older women that we can apply to our everyday lives regardless of our ages and where we live?
Pipher believes that being happy starts by first making the decision to be happy. People often wait for someone or something to bring them happiness or wait for happiness to happen to them when in fact deciding every single day to be happy is step one on the journey to happiness. She asserts that we must make it a life goal to be happy by adopting the mindset of ‘I will do everything I can to make my life as good as I can’.
After we have decided to commit to being happy. Pipher states the 4 skills that were consistently present in her happiest subjects that are important to maintaining happiness.
1. Figure out how to laugh about things and at yourself
A sense of humor goes a long way in this long life. Not taking things personally and laughing at the absurdity of every day life can help with not allowing toxic resentment and bitterness to develop inside us. Living in a city where the rudeness of the people is a sport, I admit that this is a hard one for me to master. But I try to think about a story a friend of mine who was visiting from Los Angeles told me. He and some friends were at a restaurant and the waiter accidentally spilled water on one of them. The victim freaked out and both visibly and vocally expressed his annoyance. The waiter watched the excitement and responded dryly ‘but will you live?’ They all burst out laughing including the victim. The audacity of this waiter! His response could have been something to make them angrier but they just laughed at his nerve. And he was right, they would recover from some water. I’m not saying this is how it should have been handled, but I think they all left that lunch with a good story rather than anger at not getting the response they needed from a minor incident.
2. Find meaning and purpose
Meaning could come from career, family, philanthropy anything that helps you feel useful, needed and engaged. The hard thing here is that we often worry too much about how we look and what people think which could take us away from what our true purpose may be. We must try to quiet the noise and be honest with ourselves about what truly brings meaning to our lives.
3. The ability to have friends
Human beings are social animals. Making and keeping friends is invaluable to being happy. Friends of all generations and genders are key but the author emphasizes that the happiest older women have close women friends, and she calls them a mental health insurance policy.
4. Having reasonable expectations
This one hit very close to home because my personality is such that I’m always striving to improve, grow, accomplish, accumulate. That leads to a low likelihood of being satisfied if wanting/dreaming/goal-setting is your consistent state. My husband is the opposite and helps me find balance, but it is a never ending exercise to check my thoughts and to manage wants versus haves. The author summarizes this skill with a quote her late Aunt Grace lived by:
“I get what I want because I know what to want”
Other Lessons from the women
We must be relentless in our search for joy and deeply savor every single positive experience every moment we can.
Older women are very conscious of the preciousness of time and are wonderfully ruthless about not wasting it. Younger women think they have time, we wait, put things off, avoid, postpone, hope they will change or that we will change. They deal, we dwell.
The older couples that do stay together realize that their fates are intertwined. Their approach is: “the better I am to this person, the better the relationship will be and therefore the better my own quality of life will be.” In other words, they don’t take the people that matter to them for granted and instead cherish and nurture important relationships.
It’s a lot to think about. We can’t ignore the fact that bad things will happen to all of us no matter how hard we try to live our best lives. I tend to adhere to the basic tenet of Buddhism which is that life is suffering. Accepting this fact means not allowing the inevitable set backs, tragedies and pain to ruin us. In our youth obsessed culture it sure is nice to read that as women, our best days are still to come.