How to be Happy (2010)
I’ve been a teacher for what seems like a million years. The day Chernobyl melted, I was teaching. When the bomb in Oklahoma City occurred, I was teaching. (I went into class screaming about Hate Radio, etc. etc., and a student said I needed a hug and gave me one WHICH I DID NOT WANT.) The night before the US military went into Iraq the first time, and then again years later, I was teaching. On September 11. 2001, I was teaching. When Hurricane Katrina ruined New Orleans, my New Orleans, I was teaching.
I never intended to teach. I never intended to do anything but be what my mother was, a doctor’s wife. I didn’t even have enough imagination to consider being a lawyer’s wife, or an insurance agent’s, or a stockbroker’s, but a wife it was to be, nothing more or less, I was programmed to be satisfied with that.
It didn’t turn out the way I expected, but what does? Teaching suited me. Too shy to be a real performer, I love nothing more than a captive audience for whatever is on my mind, mostly art since that is the assignment, but that doesn’t erase The World, oh no, not at all.
And now, the oil continues to leak in the Gulf of Mexico, and I am not teaching, I am summering in Mexico. I don’t know which is better when bad things happen, teaching or not, having an audience or not, being with people or being alone.
After 9/11, I didn’t smile for a long time. Who could? It was unthinkable. Comics shut down their late-night shows, and we all walked around being appropriately somber. I remember going to and from campus singing God Bless America to myself, under my breath, like a prayer. But it would be months before I could smile, and laughing was out of the question for a long, long time.
A neighbor in Mexico just said to me that I always look happy. Yes, it seems, I am addicted to being happy, or, when that fails, to looking that way. Like I told her: I love my husband, my job, my life; why not be happy? But I also told her it is mostly an act, a performance. A habit. And it works, smiling. Here is what I wrote about it for NPR’s This I Believe:
* * *
THIS I BELIEVE (2006)
Just about ten years ago, as I turned fifty, I noticed people --- my coworkers, the university students I teach, and friends --- kept asking: Are you tired? Are you sick? Is something wrong? The answer to each one was No, but my face, after 25 years or so of dependability, had given in to gravity. Apparently when I was relaxed and quiet, I looked angry or tired. So until I was ready for a face-lift, I started to smile.
I smiled everywhere, not for any reason (except vanity), just smiled: at the grocery store, in the college hallways, in my car. Smiling soon became a habit, and people started noticing. A friend asked, “What’s the joke?” and I answered honestly, “Cheap face lift.” A stranger passed me in the hall and said, “You are so happy.” I just broadened my smile, nodded, and kept walking.
I believe that you become what you do. I can recall the exact moment I “became” an artist. I was in my late-thirties and had been “doing” art --- making it, teaching about it, writing about it, and thinking about it --- for nearly twenty years. Art was my undergraduate and graduate school major, and it had been my occupation and preoccupation for a long, long time. But one day in 1983, I knew that I was an artist, much in the way people feel when they give themselves over to religious beliefs. From that moment on, everything I did would be filtered through what I did, art.
If that is true --- that one becomes what one does --- it leads me to believe that smiling can make one happy. We all know the difference between a fake smile --- that open-mouthed expression we hold for the camera saying “take the picture, take the picture” --- and a true one. People whose job is to “read” facial expressions --- to select juries or to question crime suspects --- know this, and they have identified the muscles that reveal true joy. These muscles are not around the mouth, as you might expect, but in the upper cheek, around the nose and eyes. When these muscles contract, the brain releases all sorts of feel-good chemicals, and you feel happy.
So in order to feel happy, might we create this reaction simply by activating our smile muscles? I believe this is true.
All you have to do is make this sound: EEEEE. Try it: EEEEE. If you’d rather be silent (and who wouldn’t?), you can get the same result by holding a pencil sideways between your teeth. I keep a designated pen in my car so that I can practice whenever I think about it. Even when smiling is impossible (post 9/11, for example), you can at least trigger the positive brain-juices and feel, if not happy, then at least better. My smile is a powerful thing; it has made me happier. And it is contagious.
Try it. It can’t hurt.
* * *
I keep a list, of course, of things that make me smile: the grandchildren’s hilarious comments, embarrassing stories (see Cormac Story in my Blog), that sort of thing, even people who, when I see them, automatically lift my spirits : Carlos, I think, and I smile. What greater compliment could there be?
Here is a story: One of my favorite friends from my high-school teaching days was Karen O., a theater teacher who had all the dramatic flair required for the position, plus some. She was married to a medical student, as I was then, and a few years younger than I was. She was pretty religious which was normal for Mississippi in the 1970s, so this story happened when she hosted her minister – we’d have said her preacher - for dinner. At some point in the evening she went to the bathroom at the end of a long hall. She knew someone was behind her, her husband she presumed, so she put her hands on her hips and pranced down the hall in the manner of the Murrah Misses, the elite drill team from our mutual high school; they pranced. When she got to the bathroom door, she flipped up her skirt for a classic (albeit pantied) moon, made a neat military turn, and saluted her audience – her husband, right? Of course it was the preacher-man, and everyone convulsed with laughter as she described the poor fellow’s effort to blend in with the wall. Thank you, Karen O., for telling this story that has never failed to make me smile.
You become what you do, I teach that all the time, and I credit somebody lots smarter than I - Plato, please - for saying it a long time ago. So if you want to be happy, it’s quite simple. Smile. It’s hard sometimes, impossible even, but that’s why God invented pencils.
I never intended to teach. I never intended to do anything but be what my mother was, a doctor’s wife. I didn’t even have enough imagination to consider being a lawyer’s wife, or an insurance agent’s, or a stockbroker’s, but a wife it was to be, nothing more or less, I was programmed to be satisfied with that.
It didn’t turn out the way I expected, but what does? Teaching suited me. Too shy to be a real performer, I love nothing more than a captive audience for whatever is on my mind, mostly art since that is the assignment, but that doesn’t erase The World, oh no, not at all.
And now, the oil continues to leak in the Gulf of Mexico, and I am not teaching, I am summering in Mexico. I don’t know which is better when bad things happen, teaching or not, having an audience or not, being with people or being alone.
After 9/11, I didn’t smile for a long time. Who could? It was unthinkable. Comics shut down their late-night shows, and we all walked around being appropriately somber. I remember going to and from campus singing God Bless America to myself, under my breath, like a prayer. But it would be months before I could smile, and laughing was out of the question for a long, long time.
A neighbor in Mexico just said to me that I always look happy. Yes, it seems, I am addicted to being happy, or, when that fails, to looking that way. Like I told her: I love my husband, my job, my life; why not be happy? But I also told her it is mostly an act, a performance. A habit. And it works, smiling. Here is what I wrote about it for NPR’s This I Believe:
* * *
THIS I BELIEVE (2006)
Just about ten years ago, as I turned fifty, I noticed people --- my coworkers, the university students I teach, and friends --- kept asking: Are you tired? Are you sick? Is something wrong? The answer to each one was No, but my face, after 25 years or so of dependability, had given in to gravity. Apparently when I was relaxed and quiet, I looked angry or tired. So until I was ready for a face-lift, I started to smile.
I smiled everywhere, not for any reason (except vanity), just smiled: at the grocery store, in the college hallways, in my car. Smiling soon became a habit, and people started noticing. A friend asked, “What’s the joke?” and I answered honestly, “Cheap face lift.” A stranger passed me in the hall and said, “You are so happy.” I just broadened my smile, nodded, and kept walking.
I believe that you become what you do. I can recall the exact moment I “became” an artist. I was in my late-thirties and had been “doing” art --- making it, teaching about it, writing about it, and thinking about it --- for nearly twenty years. Art was my undergraduate and graduate school major, and it had been my occupation and preoccupation for a long, long time. But one day in 1983, I knew that I was an artist, much in the way people feel when they give themselves over to religious beliefs. From that moment on, everything I did would be filtered through what I did, art.
If that is true --- that one becomes what one does --- it leads me to believe that smiling can make one happy. We all know the difference between a fake smile --- that open-mouthed expression we hold for the camera saying “take the picture, take the picture” --- and a true one. People whose job is to “read” facial expressions --- to select juries or to question crime suspects --- know this, and they have identified the muscles that reveal true joy. These muscles are not around the mouth, as you might expect, but in the upper cheek, around the nose and eyes. When these muscles contract, the brain releases all sorts of feel-good chemicals, and you feel happy.
So in order to feel happy, might we create this reaction simply by activating our smile muscles? I believe this is true.
All you have to do is make this sound: EEEEE. Try it: EEEEE. If you’d rather be silent (and who wouldn’t?), you can get the same result by holding a pencil sideways between your teeth. I keep a designated pen in my car so that I can practice whenever I think about it. Even when smiling is impossible (post 9/11, for example), you can at least trigger the positive brain-juices and feel, if not happy, then at least better. My smile is a powerful thing; it has made me happier. And it is contagious.
Try it. It can’t hurt.
* * *
I keep a list, of course, of things that make me smile: the grandchildren’s hilarious comments, embarrassing stories (see Cormac Story in my Blog), that sort of thing, even people who, when I see them, automatically lift my spirits : Carlos, I think, and I smile. What greater compliment could there be?
Here is a story: One of my favorite friends from my high-school teaching days was Karen O., a theater teacher who had all the dramatic flair required for the position, plus some. She was married to a medical student, as I was then, and a few years younger than I was. She was pretty religious which was normal for Mississippi in the 1970s, so this story happened when she hosted her minister – we’d have said her preacher - for dinner. At some point in the evening she went to the bathroom at the end of a long hall. She knew someone was behind her, her husband she presumed, so she put her hands on her hips and pranced down the hall in the manner of the Murrah Misses, the elite drill team from our mutual high school; they pranced. When she got to the bathroom door, she flipped up her skirt for a classic (albeit pantied) moon, made a neat military turn, and saluted her audience – her husband, right? Of course it was the preacher-man, and everyone convulsed with laughter as she described the poor fellow’s effort to blend in with the wall. Thank you, Karen O., for telling this story that has never failed to make me smile.
You become what you do, I teach that all the time, and I credit somebody lots smarter than I - Plato, please - for saying it a long time ago. So if you want to be happy, it’s quite simple. Smile. It’s hard sometimes, impossible even, but that’s why God invented pencils.