How to Be Happy

This is the kind of job I have: as part of my JOB I was expected (well, warmly invited) to attend a three-day Prindle Institute retreat called "Living with Joy: The Science and Skill of Happiness." Our retreat leader, Douglas A. Smith, teaches DePauw's extremely popular, life-changing Winter Term course on happiness; as our preparation for the weekend he had us read What Happy People Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Life for the Better, by Dan Baker and Cameron Stauth; the retreat was attended by DePauw alumni returning for Alumni Weekend, as well as current and retired faculty and staff, and one current student.  My favorite attendees were two mother-daughter pairs.  Can you think of any lovelier mother/daughter activity than attending a happiness retreat together?

I won't be able to stay for the third and final day of the retreat, tomorrow, because I'll be on my way to the Children's Literature Association Conference in Boston.  But here is some of what I have learned so far.

Research in the field of positive psychology shows that only 10 percent of our level of happiness is caused by our circumstances; 50 percent is caused by our "set point" (influenced by our genetic makeup); 40 percent is caused by our voluntary choices.

Happy people do better in life by almost every measure; they even live longer. One study measured the link between cheerfulness and longevity in nuns.  Of those in the most cheerful quartile (assessed upon the time of their taking holy orders), 90 percent were still alive at age 85; of those in the least cheerful quartile, only 34 percent were still alive at that same age.

What are the two key skills for making peace with one's past?  Forgiveness (of others and of oneself) and gratitude. Men are measurably better at forgiving themselves than women are; women are measurably better at forgiving others.  (Hmmm.....)  Our leader, Doug, made the pronouncement that forgiveness is THE most essential skill for happiness.  When we have painful events in our past, we only have four choices for how to deal with them: 1) forget them (good if you can do it, but most of us can't); 2) repress them (never works); 3) hold on to them (a heavy burden to carry); or 4) forgiveness.

What are the four key skills for finding confidence in the future?  Remember them by the acronym FOFO: faith, optimism, flexibility, and openness. In one study of survival in difficult situations: those who survive are those who 1) face reality, and 2) believe that anything is possible.

Then we learned a range of skills for living in the present, ranging from "doing now what you are doing now" (i.e, be mindfully present as you do it), to honoring your mental, physical, and spiritual health (by asking yourself the question, "To whom and to what do I give access to my mind, body and spirit?"), altruism (mega-important for happiness), focusing on cooperation not competition (believing in a world of abundance, not a world of scarcity), mastering the stories we tell ourselves, finding purpose in our lives, and cherishing friendships.

Then of course there are the five happiness traps to avoid, but that can be the subject for another post!  I've absorbed all I can for one day.  We alternated between large sessions and small group discussions, and I now love all the people in my small group from today (previously strangers) and will love them for all of time!  Well, at the least, I am grateful to them for sharing this happiness journey with me, and to the Prindle Institute for hosting this event, and to the universe for letting me have a job where I actually get paid to spend two days learning more about how to be happy.  That itself is cause for happiness.

Macro and Micro

The whole point of my trip to China, of course, was to attend the first-ever Chinese/American Children's Literature symposium, jointly sponsored by Texas A& M University and Ocean University, and held on the campus of Ocean University in Qingdao, China.  Twenty invited delegates attended, ten from each country, as well as a wonderful, lively group of students from Ocean University who asked good questions during the Q & A after each session.  Papers were submitted by April 1 so that they could be translated in a timely way, and a book-length compilation of all the papers together with their English or Chinese translation was given to each delegate.  Each paper/talk was simultaneously translated as it was being presented, so we all sat  wearing little headphones, as if we were at the UN. Each American visitor was also assigned a student helper to assist in everything we might need, particularly in translation, as all were fluent in English as well as being native speakers of Mandarin.  Above, see our students beginning their duties by warmly welcoming us at the Qingdao train station.

It was hard not to be struck by the differences between the American papers and the Chinese papers, both in content and in style of presentation.  The American papers were all "micro" in focus: examining one particular author, usually one particular text by one particular author, and often examining only one particular aspect of that particular text: "Embodied Metaphors in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "Missionary Work and/as Children's Book Authorship in Elizabeth Foreman Lewis's Yung Fu of the Upper Yangtze (1932)," "Black and Beautiful and Bruised Like Me: The Black Aesthetic and Picture Books of Langston Hughes," "Representing Boys and Girls in the 1912 Book of Knowledge." My own paper was slightly broader, examining what I see as a trend in children's chapter books over the past few decades of books about spunky girls contrasted with books about wimpy boys. But I locate the origin of the trend in the books of one particular author, Beverly Cleary, and most of my paper focused on one particular scene in one particular book: the scene where Ramona Quimby gets the best of Henry Huggins-as-traffic-boy in Ramona the Pest.

The Chinese papers were all "macro" in focus: sweeping overviews of trends in Chinese children's literature over the past century, many of them highlighting the seminal contributions of Lu Xunhe, a thinker and writer in the May Fourth (1919) movement, whose book How To Be a Father Today turned children's literature in the direction of child-oriented rather than adult-oriented works. The papers also seemed more "directive" than the American papers, more prescriptive of what children's literature ought to be.  I'm not sure how much this difference in approach has to do with some underlying cultural difference, or from the fact that the Chinese scholars were drawn more from colleges of education than from departments of literature, or even from some sense of responsibility on the part of the Chinese scholars to their foreign audience, who would need to get a sense of the broad terrain of Chinese children's literature before focusing on individual trees and rocks, let alone leafs and pebbles.

The two groups of scholars differed in style as well.  Almost without exception, the American scholars read our papers verbatim, partly out of a desire to assist the translators, partly out of our own academic culture.  Almost without exception, the Chinese scholars just stood before us and talked, often in an extremely lively and enthusiastic way, saying things that bore little perceivable resemblance to the text printed in the conference proceedings. 

So: macro versus micro, sedate versus exuberant.  But it isn't true that "never the twain shall meet," because they met most happily for two days in Qingdao, China, last week.

Writing at the Great Wall

Here I sit, writing in my journal as I sit on the Great Wall!

One of the best parts of any trip for me is keeping a journal of my experiences.  I'm not ordinarily a journal-writer, though I used to be when I was in my 20s.  I stopped because it felt as if I was mainly writing in my journal when I was sad or angry, and I didn't like the idea of amassing a storehouse of all these negative emotions (though I have to say that I was quite witty in my devastating portraits of bad boyfriends and failed relationships - but still.)  So now I keep a journal only when I am on a major trip.  It has to be a trip overseas to qualify.  I start the journal as the plane takes off; I end the journal on the flight home.  In between I write fairly obsessively, a record of all the sights I saw, but also a record of where I am right now in my life more generally and how my experiences as a traveler illuminate my current situation and help me distill wisdom for going forward.

Here's a snippet from this trip: 

Roberta, Lynne, Kenneth, and I decided to go out for a little after-dinner walk.  At 7:30 it was already quite dark - we must be on the eastern edge of the time zone.  The day became happier again as we wandered through narrow streets with food on offer and people sitting at very low tables - portable ones brought from home? - to eat skewers of grilled chicken that looked more tasty than our own bland dinner.  At a bakery, I bought a European-looking chocolate pastry that tasted like a Little Debbie snack cake.  It hit the spot.  I have been in sugar/chocolate withdrawal for days now.  I hadn't bought my purse, so Roberta loaned me money.  I told her I felt bad that I keep needing her to loan me money as I keep not having my purse with me.  She told me that her mother would have called me "Minnie the Mooch," which got me to laughing and got her to snorting.  Roberta has a singularly delightful snort.

So now, years from now, "when I am old and gray and full of sleep," I can nod by the fire and take down this journal, and read about that evening in Qingdao with my fellow American scholars, and I'll remember how I was Minnie the Mooch, and how Roberta gave that little snort, and it will all come back to me.  And I'll remember how I sat upon the Great Wall of China, writing, writing, writing.

Dumpling Queen

 I got home last night, after a long day of traveling: Qingdao to Beijing, Beijing to Chicago, Chicago to Indianapolis. 

I loved every minute of the trip.  My traveling companions were fabulous company; the picture above is some of us at the Summer Palace on the north side of Beijing.  Our Chinese hosts could not have been more generous, organizing a guided tour for us to the Great Wall and the Summer Palace, booking our train tickets from Beijing to Qingdao and providing a Chinese-speaking/English-speaking guide to take us to the train station and put us directly into our first-class train car, and taking care of us throughout our stay in Qingdao.  But I have to confess that my very favorite moments of the trip were the moments I spent alone.

Each morning I would wake up before 5:00 and slip out of my hotel room, both in Beijing and in Qingdao, for solitary exploring.  It was already light.  I would walk and walk, for an hour or two or more, all by myself, to meet the city on my own terms.  On the very first morning in Beijing, I walked past fancy corporate office buildings on posh broad avenues and high-end shops of all kinds and then came upon one street with lots of little side alleys containing tiny hole-in-the-wall eateries.  I saw people at one table eating steamed dumplings, meat-filled little buns, from a round pan, so I pointed at some and bought a pan of my own for less than an American dollar.  They were so soft, and warm, and juicy, and filling!  So then, every morning, I made sure to find myself a pan of dumplings on my morning walk.

In Qingdao, I also discovered a walk from the Ocean University campus, where we were lodged, to the promenade by the sea, with a pier jutting out into the water. On another day I found a neighborhood with flights of steps leading down to the water.  And, of course, I found dumplings as well, over by the railway station.  My fellow travelers started calling me the Dumpling Queen, I ate so many. I loved each dumpling so much!  And I loved finding them all by myself, in a foreign city.

Lazy Summer Days

Do you want to know what is quiet?  Here is what is quiet: Memorial Day weekend in Greencastle, Indiana.  With DePauw commencement a week ago today, all the students are gone.  Many faculty are gone as well, off to summer adventures.  The campus has no activities whatsoever listed on its website calendar.  Even the Blue Door Cafe is closed for these three days.

So I had to make my own fun.  Friday night I had dinner with my friend Keith at the Final Approach restaurant out at the Putnam County Airport.  Our table was right next to the runway, so we could watch all the planes take off and land.  Well, we could have watched all the planes take off and land if there had been even one single plane that had taken off or landed during the time we were dining.  But the $4 flavored martinis (I had green apple with cherries) were delicious.

Saturday morning I found the one truly happening spot in town, the Greencastle Farmers' Market, open now for its second Saturday of the season.  I have to confess that the pickings were slim: fewer than a dozen stands, most selling crafts rather than farm produce, and most of the farm produce just lettuce.  But I was there for almost two extremely happy hours, sitting in the shade on the courthouse steps chatting with colleagues and watching their little children at play.

Saturday afternoon stretched ahead.  What to do?  Then I opened up my Indianapolis guidebook and launched a lovely plan to take myself on an outing the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

It is an extremely wonderful place, set on the grounds of the Lilly family summer estate, with gorgeous gardens (see above) and a truly terrific collection of European and American paintings, as well as African and Asian art. I treated myself to a light pureed broccoli soup and half chicken salad sandwich at the Nourish Cafe there, as well.  And guess what they had on offer as a beverage?  Fruit-infused water!  My new favorite thing in the whole world!  I had a mix of pineapple and strawberry.

Now it's Sunday.  Church this morning - thank God for that!  Peaceful puttering at the Prindle this afternoon to finish writing the abstract of a paper I've been asked to contribute to a forthcoming volume of philosophical essays on manipulation, done with a full two hours to spare before I leave for the airport for my flight to Chicago, where I'll connect for my flight tomorrow to Beijing.  My lazy, quiet summer is about to take a turn for big time adventure!

Countdown to China

In a little more than forty-eight hours I'll be heading to the Indy airport to fly to Chicago; I'll stay overnight at an airport hotel there, and then on Monday morning, I'll hop on another plane and travel half the world away to CHINA!


I was lucky enough to be invited to the inaugural Chinese/American children's literature conference, hosted this year at Ocean University in Qingdao, China.  Ten American scholars and ten Chinese scholars were invited to attend.  The theme of the conference is "The Image of the Child in Chinese and American Children's Literature."  My paper is titled "Wimpy Boys and Spunky Girls: The Image of the Gendered Child in Postwar American Children’s Literature."  It looks at the trend in chapter books to create series starring strong, sassy girls versus series starring hapless, overwhelmed boys and locates the origin of this trend in the Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby books of Beverly Cleary.  All of our papers had to be submitted by April 1 to allow time for translation, as the conference will be bilingual.


Before the conference begins on June 1, several of the American scholars are meeting first in Beijing for sightseeing.  I'll have one day on my own with two scholar friends going to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square and one day going on an organized tour to the Great Wall and the Summer Palace.  We'll also have a sightseeing day in Qingdao, which lies right on the Yellow Sea.


I think I have everything in order: passport, visa, hotel reservations in Beijing (everything will be taken care of for us in Qingdao), high-speed train reservations from Beijing to Qingdao, business cards (I learned on my trip to Taiwan that people in Asia love exchanging business cards), gifts for our hosts, travel guide, and lots of books downloaded onto my Kindle to read on the plane, as well as plenty of pads and pens for writing, of course.  


I'm only going for a little more than a week, but it's so far away - and it's CHINA!  So today I feel like Marco Polo must have felt as I double-check my piles to make sure I haven't forgotten anything.  Oh, maybe I need a plug adapter so I can recharge my Kindle and Ipad at the hotel?  And maybe I need a special notebook for journal of my trip?   Oh, and I should charge the battery for my camera!  And put a vacation message on my email.  And just let myself get as excited as possible.  In just two more days, I'm on my away to CHINA!

New from the Blue Door

Now that Commencement with all its attendant hoopla is behind me, it's time for me to reconnect with other Greencastle pleasures.  I had breakfast this morning out at the Prindle Institute with Nicki and Linda (apple water today! as tasty as last week's orange water), and lunch at the Blue Door Cafe with Keith.  There I was thrilled to see that the Blue Door Cafe aprons had arrived for purchase, my own marketing suggestion, if I do say so myself.  And with them were Blue Door Cafe potholders!  I snapped up several sets, of course, and hurried back to the Prindle to model my new outfit for Nicki and Linda.  Nicki took this picture of me, as Linda framed me in a Vanna White moment.

Linda did seem somewhat puzzled that I would be so excited to have a Blue Door apron and Blue Door potholder when I never cook anything all year long and consume all my daily calories from Prindle breakfasts, Blue Door lunches, and Dairy Castle dinners whenever I'm not eating the enormous amount of free food constantly provided at every university event.  She seemed relieved, however, when I told her that I do cook on both Thanksgiving and Christmas.  And now I now exactly what I will be wearing on both occasions.