To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Mary Oliver

Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun is a year-long exploration of how to live happier lives. The chapters are titled after the month’s of the year, and focus on a particular aspect of happiness that Rubin highlighted each month during her project. I bought this book years ago, read a bit of it, then got side-tracked before I really sunk my teeth into it. During this books-falling-wide-awake-pandemic-salve time, I decided to come back to it. I jumped right in to October.

Rubin focuses October on the connection between mindfulness, specifically paying attention, and happiness. She has never gravitated to meditation, so she tries other things to practice mindfulness. She develops koans, special lines or mantras. She examines the rules/heuristics that guide her actions. She visits a hypnotist, practices laughing yoga, attends drawing classes, and dances when no one is watching all in an effort to cultivate mindfulness.

Rubin’s mindfulness journey is interesting to me for several reasons. I, too, struggle to meditate. I see beauty in the beginner’s mind that meditation cultivates. My walks/runs outdoors develop my capacity to pay attention. The arts have always been a way in which I have powerful encounters with my world. Indeed, my doctoral research sought to understand wide-awakeness in a high school drama classroom. Whether we are talking about mindfulness or wide-awakeness, our capacity to pay attention is a big deal. Much of my professional journey in applied research has sought to understand, and clearly articulate, the value of paying attention. Developing both formal and informal systems and structures that build our capacity to pay attention is a goal of my wide-awakeness work.