Happiness Blog

Kintsugi means “golden joinery” and is the Japanese practice of repairing broken ceramics with gold lacquer. Instead of discarding damaged pottery they repair it and emphasize the scar, making it a focal point of beauty. They believe that the suffering and damage from a meaningful history is cause for celebration. Using kintsugi to repair the piece renders it more valuable than before.

We’ve all felt broken or damaged at some point. It’s inevitable, unless you don’t plan to go anywhere, say anything, do anything, or meet anyone. So the goal cannot be to avoid getting scarred but rather to make the scars into something meaningful. Like the kintsugi artist we can enhance the beauty and value in our own lives by filling our scars with meaning and gratitude. Figure out your own way of kintsugi-ing your scars and imperfections instead of trying to hide them. Celebrate each one for what it is – a testament to your will to live a life worth living.

‘Tis the season to be grateful! Research shows that practicing gratitude intentionally (and not just having a passing grateful thought) makes it more meaningful and is an effective skill for boosting happiness. Small but important details of how you practice gratitude can affect how beneficial this happiness skill can be. For instance, writing down what you’re grateful for helps to organize your thoughts and make it more clear and real in your head. Expressing gratitude to others makes them feel appreciated and allows you to experience the effects of that. So here are two gratitude activity suggestions for all ages:

1. Gratitude scavenger hunt. Make a list of 20 (or more!) prompts for things that people feel grateful for. Participants have a limited amount of time to find evidence of of each and bring them back – first one back wins. The prompts can be related to anything at all. You can find ideas in senses (something that smells good), feelings (something that makes me feel excited), thinking (something that I recently learned), location (something in nature/a place I have visited), comparatives (someone who is older than me/from a different culture), characteristics (something that is red/tiny/attached to the ground, etc.). Give participants chances to use people as their answers since feeling grateful for people tends to be more meaningful than feeling grateful for things. And give people a chance to feel grateful for adversity (something that was hard for me, something that scared me, something I didn’t want to do). Afterward, talk about why they are grateful for some of these things.
2. Gratitude jars. Have everyone in the family jot down ten (or more!) things about each family member that they are grateful for. Research shows that specific gratitude (acknowledging the giver’s intentions, the cost to the giver, or the benefit to the recipient) is more meaningful then vague gratitude. So, “That time you brought me to work when my car wouldn’t start, and you didn’t make me feel bad about it even though it made you late for work. I was able to get there in time to deliver my presentation, which made me a contender for that promotion” is likely to feel more meaningful then “You’re a helpful person.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

You know that famous proverb, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”? It’s a neat little saying.

It needs to be adjusted.

If when you fail you just try again and again without making a change to what you’re doing, you’re going to experience a lot of demoralizing failure. If what you’re doing isn’t working, change it. You probably do this a lot anyway without realizing it. If your 3-point shots always float to the right then you will naturally adjust your follow-through slightly to the left. If every time you serve broccoli your whole family avoids it you’re probably going to put some cheese on it next time or give them carrots instead. If traffic always makes you late for work you are going to leave earlier or try a different route or change your schedule. We have a natural drive to do what works. But when emotion is involved we don’t always use such logic. When angry, we might approach our partner with the same harsh start-up even though it leads to the same bad argument. In our enthusiastic hopefulness we might set the same exercise goal that we never reach and always end up feeling bad about. At these emotion-laden times it pays to be aware when what we’ve been doing isn’t working, and then we need to adjust our approach.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try again maybe one more time the same way just to be sure, and then consider why it’s not working and do it differently.”

It just rolls off your tongue, doesn’t it?

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. – American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr

That version’s a bit fancied-up from the one we usually hear, but I think it’s the original. Regardless of your beliefs about a higher power, it’s just good common sense to figure out what you can and can’t change, change what you can, and accept what you can’t. But I thought I’d clear up something about the acceptance piece as I’ve found myself talking about it more than usual lately:

The following are three different creatures: Acceptance, Resignation, Embracement.

Resignation sounds like this: “I’m so unhappy. I can’t change this thing and I wish I could. I will sit with it though I don’t want to, and I will always wish it were different.” Acceptance is like this: “Well, this is reality. I can’t change it, so I choose to exist with it peacefully.” And here’s Embracement: “This is how it is and since I cannot change it I welcome it in with an open mind and heart and I will find a way for it to add to my life and help me grow.” We have a choice of resignation, acceptance, or embracement about things that we can’t change. When we choose embracement we are choosing to actively work on happiness. It is not always easy.

It is always worth it.

Your friend comes up to you at a party and says, “That girl over there is such an idiot!” She could mean:

• The girl humiliated her.
• The girl got a low score on her SATs.
• The girl didn’t get her joke.
• The girl doesn’t share her political views.
• The girl said something that wasn’t factually accurate.
• The girl is dating your friend’s ex-boyfriend.

…and we could go on and on.

Your friend’s statement is a judgment while the bulleted options are facts. We learned in the last post that, while judgment has its place, it can be vague and misleading because it’s a shortcut (for consequence, preference, or standard) that we overuse. Since we’re inundated with judgments we tend to hear them as statements of fact rather than an unclear opinion driven by emotion.

JUDGMENT CHALLENGE: For one day, notice judgments. Practice interpreting other people’s judgments flexibly. Remake your own judgments into facts and notice that not only does your real meaning come across but the emotion is decreased or eliminated. For example, “I’m fat” could be changed to “I weigh 50 lbs more than I want to” or “My doctor is concerned about my health.” More information and less emotion make more room for happiness which – all judgment aside – is a good thing.

You’re at a family reunion and your cousin whispers, “Aunt June’s chicken salad is bad.” She means:

a. The dish has been sitting out in the sun and you might get sick if you eat it.
b. The dish has curry in it and your cousin hates curry.
c. This dish can’t compare to the other many delicious dishes there.
d. The chicken used in the dish wasn’t a free-range chicken raised on organic feed.

Judgment is shorthand for a few things: consequences (choice a), preference (b), and standard (c and d). It has its place – it’s not a bad thing to say a book was good, and it could be important to warn someone about that chicken salad. But judgment is vague and makes the listener responsible for figuring out what we mean. If they guess right, no harm done. But if they don’t, well, things can get messy. You might save the day at the family reunion by letting people know to avoid the spoiled chicken salad. Or you might end up just making Aunt June feel bad while depriving curry-loving relatives of the best dish of their lives.