Nat

It’s eight days since the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Usually I won’t blog on politics here, because I want to encourage a wide audience, but I am thrilled by the number of Republican observers who seem as awestruck as I by the historical significance of our finally looking past race in the election of a President.

It too me several months to recognize how inspiring Obama is as a leader, and when I did, I wondered that I didn’t see it all along. Maybe I have finally put down my skepticism of professional politicians and campaigns long enough to appreciate that hope has triumphed. I know that millions of people hoped for President Bush to win election, twice. What is different is that President-elect Obama somehow knew all along, for two years, that there were millions of Americans who wanted to believe in a brighter future, one in which large challenges can be tackled with large ideas.

Mostly, though, I have spent this past week gobbling up every scrap I could find about people who look at Obama and see the answer to their hopes: finally, an African-American; finally, a Hawaiian; finally, a man who grew up abroad; finally, a great orator; finally, a son of a single mother. He carries himself well, with dignity and sensitivity and intelligence.

And also with purpose. Much has been said about the high expectations for his presidency. We need so much right now. I am not troubled by the high expectations. One of President-elect Obama’s gifts is to inspire people to ask what they can do to help. It feels to me, at last, as if we are in this together. That is what I have wanted to believe.

I keep waking up happy.

I read an article today in which the author wrote that joy is an inherent component of our character, not just the potential to experience joy, but joy itself. We are born with it. It is a divine gift. He went on to say that when we feel less than joyful, we don’t need to work to find some external element to bring us joy (a new job, money, a vacation). We just need to look inside ourselves and remember the joy that is already there.

He went on to discuss working at a job in particular, repeating the idea that to find satisfaction in our work, we don’t need to “do what we like,” we can just learn to “like what we do.” It has the advantage of bringing us quicker relief.

There is nothing new in this, of course. Michael and I read and comment on writers and teachers who, over the course of centuries advised that our answers lie within our minds. We must work to master them. I was just struck today by the idea that our shift in attitude starts by acknowledging what is already there, what is already true.

I came to my office to clean up some of the piles on my desk. I never feel I have time for this on a workday, but today, without the commotion of meetings and emails, I can work at the pace I like best: slowly.

So there’s a trick to liking what I do: find a way to do it slowly. It’s very relaxing. Now if only I can remember that on Monday morning.

Any ideas?

Today’s edition of “All Things Considered” on NPR featured a story on John Nese’s store in Los Angeles, called Galco’s Soda Pop Stop. Nese inherited the store from his father and now stocks over 500 types of hard-to-find soda pop. He carries a brand of root beer made from sasparilla bark, and he even carries rose petal soda, which he imports from Romania.

Not only is this my favorite kind of radio feature story, shedding light on a particularly unusual and whimsical slice of American life, it took me back to the product attachment I used to have as a child. Items that resonate in this way include Chuckles candies and Necco Wafers, cotton candy, Stan Mikita hockey helmets, Eskimo Pie mint ice cream bars, and Schwinn bicycles. Chuckles and Necco Wafers hold a special spot because we used to stop at Ada’s Penny Candy on the way home from church with my father every Sunday. He bought the Sunday New York Times there, even though we subscribed for home delivery every other day of the week. Ada wrote every regular customer’s last name on the copies of the paper in black grease pencil. The candy was the real reason my dad bought his paper there, though he loved Ada and served with her on a town political committee.

I am a product marketer’s dream. When a particular product establishes a place in my memory and my life, it stays there forever. So when I was in the Phoenix Airport last month, I was thrilled to come across a kiosk that sold Chuckles and other throwback candies. I could even remember, 25 years after I ate my last packet of the fruit jellies, in which order I always ate them, from least favorite to most: green, orange, red, yellow, black.

The radio story captured my imagination not only because I loved the idea of seeing all of these unusual sodas in one place, but also because I couldn’t imagine the business sense behind making an obscure soda in a very small operation with such narrow distribution that no one has ever heard of it. There is only one reason to invest in making a product like this: you want to connect with a person like me.

I can’t wait to go. Please listen to the story. If you ever go to L.A., please visit the store and let me know how it was. Here’s the link, if you want to buy online. You can buy old fashioned candies, including Chuckles, there too. Yum.

Today was the first day back at work after vacation, and my boss was incredibly gracious and let me work the morning at home before going to the airport. I flew 16 hours yesterday to get from Spokane to Boston (via Phoenix and Las Vegas), and I’m flying back out on business now. So it was a great relief to have my boss give me this flexibility today.

One of the lessons I’m learning from Michael is to appreciate the small blessings that come our way. Today was a perfect example, and I’m heading out on business now feeling great.

My boss also just returned from a trip, and she extended exactly the courtesy she would have wanted her boss to extend her. I love that kind of thoughtfulness. I’m very fortunate to have the boss I do, because this is the way she always thinks. For a long time, I worried about the parts of the job that I found difficult or annoying, and naturally those types of circumstances then magnified in my mind and my experience.

Now I’m working hard to focus on the little things that go well. It turns out to be really easy if you just remind yourself to do it. I’m catching myself being grateful more frequently. Many parts of my life seem better, and I suspect it’s because I am just noticing how much there is to appreciate in my life.

First day back has been great. I’m expecting tomorrow to be the same.

The end of vacation is bittersweet, of course. It is always hard to reconcile the feeling of being completely relaxed with the imagined pressure of returning full bore into one’s responsibilities. One of the things I’m challenging myself to do this year, though, is to enjoy each nice moment without looking past it toward the next likely challenge.

So here I am, with my wife and stepdaughter safely deposited at the airport, waiting for my later flight in a great independent cafe in Palm Springs. The music and coffee are good. I have a private table with an electrical outlet and a high-speed internet connection. I’ve been able to download some movies and TV shows for my flight later today, and I’m catching up on email.

Palm Springs is one of those places where you can imagine that a large number of residents feel grateful every day for the palm trees, sunshine and mountain views that abound here. We will return next winter, as we did this year, and if we’re lucky, my stepdaughter’s field hockey team will earn an entry into the tournament they hold every Thanksgiving week right up the street from our favorite hotel. It is great fun to think that we would come back here before the end of the year.

In short, I love having a happy experience that I’m likely to repeat in the near future. My wife likes to say that we are creatures of habit, and I guess I would say that she is a creature of habit, but I’m happy to go along when the habits are so entertaining. Palm Desert is great for tennis this time of year, sunny and dry, and I took a lesson yesterday to try to revive my singles game. My instructor, Katie, had a great, easy way of thinking about the game.

Don’t think so much, she told me. It’s a simple game. Get the ball back over the net. She teaches a method that has the following slogan, “Form is not a fundamental.” What it means in the context of tennis is that you are just as likely to be responding to “an emergency situation” as to hit a shot with a perfect setup from a location you expected. Wow, what a life parallel.

In these cases, she says, do your best to get your racket on the ball and try to hang in there for a situation that’s more to your liking. Like all great instruction, and I find this especially from great athletic coaches for some reason, the most useful principles sound like a life philosophy.

So here I am in paradise for a few more hours, seeing my improved forehand approach shot in my mind, loving the bright sunshine on the sides of the Santa Rosa mountains, and thinking that it will be summer soon enough at home.

I am grateful for the chance to start over, no matter how many times I have to do so. I have started to kick my sugar habit dozens of times in the last 2 years. Usually I start on a Monday. Then, if I don’t make it to Thursday, I figure, Well, I’ll start next week. I always feel good about starting.

When I’m in the gym, I watch the hard core athletes with admiration. I used to envy them, until I realized how silly it is to feel that others’ discipline is something to envy. Nothing would keep me from approaching fitness the same way but the lack of determination to do it. That’s what I love about the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” It makes us accountable for taking control of our habits.

My habit since writing this blog has been to start and stop. In part, I stop because it requires a great commitment to be a widely read blogger, to scan other related blogs and cross-communicate with their authors. I have other projects that keep me from doing this.

Nevertheless, it is a worthy project to document here what I find about the search for happiness. More and more writers and researchers are taking the subject seriously.

My take for today is that we can always renew our intention to find a healthier way to think about our lives and our world. My great friend, Claire, told me today about the power of surrender. To surrender apparently derives from the idea of giving oneself up, or to give back more than was given. There are many efforts to which we can sensibly give ourselves up. Giving ourselves over to improving our thought is a very good start.

I played in a simple round-robin tennis tournament today with my wife and stepdaughter. Even a year ago this would have been unimaginable to me. I was terrified of under-performing. But my wife convinced me that when you play, all you have to do is make the experience pleasant for those around you, win or lose. This is so simple. It is easy for me to compliment those who play well, even if they are beating me. And the thing is that in a morning, I am bound to have some good shots along with the bad ones.

It is better not to be afraid. I am giving up certain kinds of fear. This is where renewal always begins for me.

What do you do to make tomorrow better than today?

Michael and I have been working on a book for a few months now, and we took this weekend to get away and make a major dent in it. It shouldn’t surprise me that the work would be so much fun, I guess, but I have spent much of my adult life afraid of long writing projects.

So, today we compiled the notes that we have been writing in 15-minute bursts since November, and we turned them into an outline. Michael did the typing, which I love because it lets me pace while we talk and think. Writing for me is easier when I’m not actually writing. It is typical of Michael to make things fun for me.

The best part of the day is finding work that doesn’t feel like work. To have any activity unravel from oneself effortlessly and focus the mind so that it requires no strain can be the best kind of inspiration. That was true for me over and over today. I have been wanting to remember what a joy it is to be working, and it’s easier for me when the work is entirely my invention. The collaboration makes it even better. It occurred to me in a cafe before dinner that writing a book with another person cuts the number of words in half for each of us. Huh.

Where am I going with this? Just that spending two days thinking about how to cultivate happiness automatically puts me in mind of how to appreciate being happy. My grandmother, who passed away this week, taught me about the state of happiness years ago when I was 18. I had broken up with a girl I adored. I had been moping around for days or weeks when my grandmother came to visit with my parents. She was always glad to see me, but she became very angry with me after dinner.

“You’ve got to snap out of this,” she told me after dinner in her hotel room. “Nobody wants to be around somebody as sour and withdrawn as you are. We will put up with you because we love you, but the people who don’t love you won’t stay with you for a minute if they don’t have to.” I was shocked to be called out by her like that, but she said it in a way that really shook up my thinking.

Naturally she was right. Unhappiness itself doesn’t drive people away, but the way you wear it does. Like it or not, that’s just a cold, hard fact. Better to adopt as friendly and hopeful a demeanor as you can. With any luck, it will draw toward you people whose company will console and reassure you. Maybe they will make you laugh, or at least forget yourself for a minute.

Friendship and love can be our salvation, even when it is friendship and love we have lost. This is what I have been feeling since last night, when Michael and I arrived at the hotel and started to work. I have felt it today. I feel my grandmother near as I write, and I am grateful to her.

Yesterday a nor’ easter storm, made up of the remnants of tropical storm Noel, whipped into town and knocked out our power at 4:00 in the afternoon. Fortunately, other parts of town were unaffected, so we were able to have dinner at a restaurant right up the street. It was the best of both worlds. Other than having dinner in a warm, heated restaurant, we spent the late afternoon and evening enjoying our family’s company by candlelight.

In those circumstances, simple pleasures reassert themselves. Balancing the checkbook, a chore I detest, assumes a quaint, Dickensian feel, and reading a book feels like a special treat. After dinner, I hauled in the small pile of dry wood from the porch, and my wife built our first fire of the season.

We hunted down all of our candles, arrayed them on trays in front of the fire, and played Uno, the card game, for an hour. In that light, it was hard to distinguish green from blue cards, which added to the game’s suspense and surprise. Finally, we decided to beat the cold that had settled into the house by heaping extra blankets on the beds and turning in early.

Adding in the extra hour we gained setting back the clocks for Standard Time, I slept for 11 hours. In short, it was a simple celebration of winter pleasures like families would have experienced a hundred fifty years ago.

It is a great reminder to me that happiness can sometimes come from subtraction. What I mean is that we often think, “If only I had…” I would be more happy. But in this case, it was the absence of creature comforts and electronic entertainment that gave us one another’s laughter and companionship.

What a treat.

For the third day in a row, I am absolutely exhausted. It seems like two weeks since I returned from Colorado, and that was only on Monday. Part of dealing with exhaustion is figuring out whether it is physical or emotional. I think it is both. I have really struggled this week to deal with the challenges in our office with good humor and optimism.

Sometimes I wonder whether well-being and joy are made in moments like these, when we feel they are far removed from us. How do I reach out and pull them to me? I think Esther Hicks and the Abraham guides would say this is where you reach for the better feeling thought. I agree that it helps to think of something that is better than I am thinking right now.

Right now I am thinking, it really still hurts where I was chewing a pretzel stick and jammed it into my gum. What is better than thinking that? My wife went to a charity auction tonight and won us tickets in a luxury box to see a Boston Celtics game in December. What a treat to spend the night in the city with my wife after a fun night out. That’s a much better thought.

Even thinking about my situation, I can find my way to “it is almost the weekend and there is the chance to sleep in and choose what to focus on for at least a few hours.” Maybe I will clean up my office. That would feel good and would take no more than 5 hours. It’s about simple steps.

I will stop with the baseball after this (probably). Thank you to all of you who are indulging me. But here’s the thing. I waited until I was nearly 40 to see the Red Sox win their first Series, and tonight, just three years later, I was sitting in the stadium in Denver to see them win their second Series in 4 years, in person. Because it was such a tense game, I didn’t really enjoy being there until it was over.

Now, though, all I can think is how happy my father would have been for me that I got to see it happen. He was generous about my love for the Red Sox, switching his childhood allegiances to root for my team, with the love of a convert, I should add. My mother is a big fan now, too. She especially loves Manny Ramirez.

My friends Derek and Karen made this happen for me. I can’t even describe how happy I am. But it feels great.