Three Books You Must Read

Oh dear! When you try to get people to read something it's usually futile. My mother used to leave books on my bedside table when I was a teenager in the hope that I'd read them, and I don't think I ever did. But I can at least write this post, and then I'm not buttonholing people in person. Let me first say that none of these is a Christian book; none will tell you how to get to Heaven. So I make no claims in that area for them. They are unashamedly secular self-help books, and so a big piece of the puzzle is missing. We can't really help ourselves; we can't change our hearts--only God can do that. At least some of the ideas in these books need to be matters of prayer for me. Having said that, I will say that theSE three books truly flipped a switch for me in some daily life issues. Maybe they can do the same for you--who knows?

If you're only going to read one of these, read:
THE HAPPINESS PROJECT--WHY I SPENT A YEAR TRYING TO SING IN THE MORNING, CLEAN MY CLOSETS, FIGHT RIGHT, READ ARISTOTLE, AND GENERALLY HAVE MORE FUN by Gretchen Rubin, HarperCollins, 2009.
You may have heard of this book--it has been on the best-seller list and has a popular blog associated with it. I can't say enough good things about it. What the author has done without being aware of it is to take the famous quotation from the great preacher David Martin Lloyd-Jones, "Too many of us listen to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves" and written a whole book about how to change that. (Lloyd-Jones is saying that we need to take charge of our thoughts instead of just passively letting them wash over us. He almost certainly got this idea from II Corinthians 10:5: "We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" NIV.) Rubin is in her late thirties, lives in New York City and before this had written books about JFK and Churchill. One day on the bus she realized that, though she had a wonderful life with professional success, a great husband, two beautiful daughters and a close family, she wasn't really aware of her blessings on a day-to-day basis--she wasn't happy, most of the time. Why was that? Could she change it? And thus she launched herself on this project. Her main model was Benjamin Franklin, who set himself what could be called a "virtue project." You may have read the section of his Autobiography that tells about this, as it's a staple in high school and college English literature books. I thought when I read her title that this was just a light, humorous book that would be fun to read and ended up being so impressed with it that I used it as our "trip book" to read aloud in the car when we went to New York recently. It's hard to describe. It's not sappy. It's not dogmatic or preachy. It's beautifully written and very funny in parts. And it's inspiring. Truly. There is a glut of books out there these days on the theory and philosophy of happiness, but the ones I've seen are way too general. Rubin isn't afraid to tell us about the details of her life, including the time she got mad and threw a pillow at her husband because he said she snored. One of her ideas is that we need to come up with our own set of personal commandments to help us with our own happiness, tailored to our weaknesses. If I follow these 12 commands (Gretchen and I both have 12!) I will be happier: that is, I will feel productive, connected and in control, and have less stress and guilt. Here they are:

1. The big things that you do once in awhile matter less than the small things that you do consistently. I had a dear friend and colleague a number of years who shared my approach to tasks, especially in the area of housekeeping. We were both single and living alone, and we used to joke that we were "on the burst" housekeepers instead of "steady state" ones. Now I find myself muttering, "Every day, Debi, every day," as I am tempted to put off until tomorrow the post-dinner cleanup or some other daily task. But this idea applies to far more than wiping off the bathroom counter or keeping up with paperwork. It especially applies to relationships. I'm reminded of something my mother said to me once. She was talking about my housekeeping propensities (or lack thereof) but what she said applied to the way I lived my life in general (and, I'm convinced, the way most people live theirs.) She said, "Debi, you get your apartment all cleaned up and it looks really nice, but then when you try to keep it cleaned up you get bored. So you let it get really messy, and then you have to you clean it all up and that's exciting because it's dramatic." That's a pretty accurate quotation. And she was completely right. That was exactly what was going on with me in the way I lived my daily life. In relationships, too, I think it's tempting to have long slides, big blowups, emotional reconciliations, and then back to the long slide. But if that's the way we handle things, in whatever area, then we spend most of our lives in the "long slide" part of the equation. The house is almost always messy. The laundry is almost always behind. And the relationship (this applies especially to marriage) is almost always in a state of low-level bickering, disinterest or neglect. I have been so saddened as I've thought about my father's last years when he lived in San Diego. He remarried in 1995 after my mother died and moved out to California. It turned out to be a very good decision for him in many ways, but he did miss Colorado. As his health failed he became more and more limited in his activities, and he was very lonely. I needed to call him regularly, maybe once a week for 15 minutes. A small thing. It would have cost me practically nothing in terms of money or time and meant a lot to him. I just needed to plan to make it happen. But my father and I weren't particularly close. And there was a three-hour time difference between Virginia, where we were living at the time, and California. I would think of calling him when it wasn't feasible, such as 9:00 AM my time, 6:00 AM his time, or when it was inconvenient for me, such as 10:00 PM, my bedtime, which would have been 7:00 PM for him, right after supper. I'd think, Oh, I'll call him tomorrow. But, as my husband says, tomorrow never comes. I rarely actually made the call. But, just in case you think that I was a totally neglectful daughter, I did make sure that we went out as a family to see him in San Diego on a pretty regular schedule every other year. When he went into a nursing home in 2006 I made a point of having us go out there during my son's spring break and see what his situation was. Trips to San Diego involved plane tickets, a hotel room, a rental car, and admissions charges for activities during the day. They were a big thing. And I'm sure that my dad enjoyed seeing us. But . . . if I'd had to choose the consistent small thing or the occasional big thing, I would have done best by making those weekly calls. Now he's gone.

2. Quit offering unsolicited advice. No one's going to listen to you anyway, and you'll just annoy people. (This advice doesn't apply to parenting. ) I am the queen of unsolicited advice, so this commandment really hits me hard. I want to be tactful, so I often phrase my advice as a question: "Why don't you . . . ?" I have a hard time drawing the line between giving advice and offering to help, but if I take a task off someone's hands I guess I'm free to do it my way. It's very hard for me to suppress my natural tendency to take people by the shoulders and give them a good shake, but that sort of thing hardly ever works. You do hear stories of people being told, and told, and told again about some action they need to take, finally being persuaded, and making life-altering changes. I just seem to put people's backs up when I try to do this, though. Maybe it's a gift I just don't have. So I need to bite my tongue and keep my mouth shut unless someone's doing something really life threatening--or unless someone actually asks for my advice.

3. Shut up and deal with it. I don't use the words "shut up" to anyone else, but I like the way this command works for me. In other words, get on with it. Do what needs to be done. Quit whining. And don't be squeamish. I read somewhere recently about a mother who taught her children that squeamishness was the least profitable emotion on earth. It accomplishes nothing. So, Debi, clean up that mess, take care of that situation. Hold your nose if you have to, but quit digging your big toe in the dirt and explaining why you can't do so and so, or aren't good at such and such. And for goodness' sake quit saying that you're "not that kind of person" when you need to be that kind of person! I've said many times, for instance, that I'm "just not the kind of person who remembers to have her cell phone with her." And, sure enough, there have been numerous times when a charged-up, turned-on cell phone would have saved me and others a lot of time and frustration. (I know, I know--there may be people reading this for whom a cell phone is as necessary as an opposable thumb. Trust me--there are lots of people around like me.) I have decided that there are few utterances more irritating than the constant refrain of "Oh, I don't know how to do this" or "I can't do this" or "How do you do this again?" These utterances often come from those of us who have attained a certain age and concern our (supposed) inability to deal with new technology. My poor patient brother has given me his cell phone number at least half a dozen times. I've finally put it in my cell phone address book. It sounds small, but it's not--not for me, anyway.

4. Say what needs to be said kindly and with a smile. Just this morning I got out of the shower and saw that my husband and son still hadn't left the house to go over to the in-laws'. My sister-in-law is in town and we're spending as much time as possible with her. But instead of saying, smilingly, "Oh, I thought you had left," I snarled, "Haven't you guys left yet?" In fact I could write an endless stream of examples of my snarling at my dear husband and son, mostly over things that they have done with the best intentions in the world. Take a deep breath and smile before you say something. Or, as the book of Psalms says, "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer" (Psalm 19;14, KJV). The pastor of the church I attended in grade school always ended his public prayers with that verse. Both the mouth and the heart have to be involved.

5. Respond appropriately when others are rude and disrespectful to you. It may seem strange that I would list this command in a discussion of how to be happy. But many of us, when we lie awake at night thinking about things that bother us, stew over what we should have said in various situations where people said or did something rude. We're not so much unhappy about what the other person said as we are about what we said, or failed to say. It has taken me a long time to realize this principle, and is it ever a struggle for me to implement it! As the British would say, I find it a bit of a facer when someone is rude. You'd think that my years of teaching high school would have given me the ability to come up with good comebacks, but that's not so. And snappy put-downs are not really the point, anyway. It's a matter of self-respect and of having the relationship on a proper footing. Sometimes the best thing is to ignore the rudeness; other times some type of answer or rebuke is needed. But when do you do what? I agonize over this. So far in my new resolve on this issue I've at least managed not to do what I usually do, which is to be taken aback and not want to make other people uncomfortable (including the person who's being rude!), and instead have shut down in such a marked fashion that the person (the rudee, as it were) has noticed and said something, which has at least meant that the incident hasn't just been glossed over. I'm so terrible at thinking on my feet and so good at realizing what I should have said when it's too late. I've been trying to think ahead about what would be appropriate things to say in certain situations; now I just have to implement them. (How about, "I'm sure you don't mean that to be as rude as it sounds"?) Otherwise I just have another incident to stew about at 2:00 AM.

6. Cultivate the habit of remembering where you put things (including the car). See "I'm just not that kind of person" above. It does no good for me to say that I never remember where I parked the car, or put my keys or sunglasses. The time I've wasted looking for things is enormous. If I truly take that time seriously I will be motivated to do something about it. Just today I spent a useless hunk of time looking for my billfold. I knew I'd brought it home. Where on earth was it? I couldn't leave for shopping without it. I looked every possible place at least twice. We all know the drill. It finally turned up--on the piano bench. Why on earth did I put it there? Beats me.

7. Recognize who's in charge and don't butt heads if it's not you. Be gracious and do things their way. Maybe you'll be in charge some day.

8. DON'T FUSS. The faults that most irritate us in others are often the faults we have ourselves. I'm a fusser! If someone else were doing it I'd be saying, or at least thinking, "What difference does it make?" But when it's me, then whatever it is that's bothering me is the most important thing in the world. Just last week we hosted a family get-together to celebrate my husband's birthday. I planned to have us eat outside on our beautiful deck, but for some reason there were a lot of aggressive wasps out there and everyone came back inside. They decided to reset the table in the dining room, on the almost-new, completely BARE and UNPROTECTED dining room table. People were clinking serving dishes and silverware down. It sounded like shattering glass to me. I stood there, quietly stewing, wanting to say something but not being able to think of how to phrase things without sounding like you-know-who. Fortunately, my dear sister-in-law stepped into the breach and said, "Shouldn't there be some kind of protection on this table?" And everyone decamped to the kitchen table. Whew! Somehow I need to learn to handle situation such as this one in a way that puts the comfort of people first but still prevents damage to my possessions, WITHOUT FUSSING.

9. DON'T COMPLAIN. I say this to my son, but I do it myself. Sometimes I complain in order to make conversation, but it would be better to have silence!

10. Don't be difficult; say "yes" whenever possible. Agree with the plans if you can. Maybe it's not your favorite restaurant. Maybe you think it would be better to sit over there than to sit here. Maybe the timing could be better, or you're not in the mood to do this but would rather do that. I think of the lovely evening one Friday when my husband said, "Let's go to the Free Shakespeare play tonight." It was perfect weather for a summer outing, a rarity in Virginia. But I just wasn't in the mood. I hadn't thought about going then. I was thinking we'd do something else. Whatever. So we didn't go. And when we finally did go, several weeks later, putting ourselves though an unbelievable odyssey involving car and bus travel, it was rained out. (He never said a word of recrimination.) Why couldn't I just have said, "Sure, why not?"

11. Be more "there you are" than "here I am." There aren't very many "there you are" people around. Many conversations, for example, aren't really conversations at all: they're competing monologues. You're telling me about your experience, and I'm supposed to be listening, but what I'm really doing is waiting for you to draw breath so that I can get in the story about my experience. Jim and I have talked about this human tendency a number of times. This desire to get in my story or opinion leads to my often doing something that I hate when someone does it to me: I interrupt a lot. Don't draw that breath in the middle of your sentence! If you do that when you're talking to me, you're lost. I have also begun to realize that when I look forward to having new people over for dinner what I really anticipate is that the company will be interested in hearing about me. I'm not too interested in getting to know them. I'm making a little progress, though. Last week a family friend e-mailed me about the trip he was taking from Seattle east to the Colorado Rockies. We took the same trip, only in the other direction, in 2008. I started to tell him that in my reply. Then I stopped. This was his trip. He didn't really want to know about mine. Instead I wrote back that it sounded like he was having a wonderful time and that I hoped we'd get to see his pictures. If I'm truly interested in him and his trip, by the way, then I won't be so tempted to try to prove, at least to myself, that my trip was better. A focus on others will help me avoid the insidious habit of always comparing myself to others, sometimes to my credit, but often in the other direction. Galation 6:4 says, "Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else" (NIV). What drives us to be constantly in a stew about how we stack up against others is the "here I am" mentality.

12. Plan ahead so that you're prepared and on time. Is this an original piece of advice or what? I'm constantly impressed, though, with what I'm going to call "the importance of five minutes." It's so wonderful to have that little cushion of time--it makes all the difference between being stressed and being relaxed.

I'm sure I can come up with more commandments; I'll do that when I've implemented these.

THE SKINNY: HOW TO FIT INTO YOUR LITTLE BLACK DRESS FOREVER by Melissa Clark and Robin Aronson, Meredith Books: 2006.

I caught a passing reference to this title not long after it was published and ordered a copy. While I have never had any type of serious weight problem I had gone around for years carrying 10-15 pounds more than I wanted and feeling that I either needed to lose the weight or give up and buy a size larger pants. I had read French Women Don't Get Fat when it first came out and had really liked it but never implemented her ideas. I think (sorry, Mireille) that she's just a bit too hoity-toity for those of us who shop at a regular grocery store and don't make several trips a year to France to buy prunes. (Yes, prunes. Well, maybe she does a few more things while she's there, but she does buy her prunes in France.) The Skinny is basically FWDGF for ordinary American women. Some of the writing is pretty cutesy, and Melissa's recipes for the most part sound pretty inedible. ("London Broil with Caramelized Pineapple"?) But the authors give excellent advice on the day-to-day business of losing weight and then maintaining that loss. Something about the book gave me the impetus I needed to get rid of those excess pounds. I did buy the new pants--but they were a size smaller, not larger, and I'm still wearing them over four years later.

And this whole weight-loss issue leads to an idea I've had recently: There are diets and there are philosophies of how to eat, and the two are very different. But the diet books sell the most, because they promise you some type of easy-to-follow formula. If you'll eat this and not eat this, whether it's fats or carbohydrates or cabbage soup, you'll lose weight. So people put their faith in the diet and then don't follow it, or follow it only briefly, because it's too hard to stick to it. Since the only tool they've been given is the diet, and they haven't followed that, they just go back to eating the way they always do, which causes them to gain back any weight they might have inadvertently lost on the diet in the first place. If you have some type of over-arching philosophy of what you eat and how much you eat, though, then you know that you're in control and that tomorrow you can always cut back if you overeat today. The one philosophy-of-eating book that has sold well is, of course, French Women Don't Get Fat, and the reason for its success is, I think, that the author seems so glamorous to us Americans. (I know, I know: I just said that she's too hoity-toity. But I did buy her book, even if I didn't really do what she said.) She has an adorable French accent and is the CEO of a champagne company. How glitzy is that? Her book is charmingly written and illustrated. Stripped of their trappings and associations, though, her ideas are very simple: Eat well, pay attention to what you eat, and make wise decisions along the way.

Two good but differing examples of weight loss have occurred in the church we used to attend in DC. One of the associate pastors, a man in his thirties, had gotten to the point at which he needed to lose 35-40 pounds, so he started following one of the low-carbohydrate diets decried in the previous paragraph. However, from what I overheard him saying to others and from his obvious success, it is clear that he used the diet as a tool, not as a magic formula, pairing it with a good exercise program. He felt that it helped him to have some definite guidelines laid out for him, and the weight came off and stayed off. (To be fair, any diet that keeps you from eating what I call "industrial pastry" has some value.) The senior pastor, on the other hand, after being told repeatedly by his doctor that he must, must, MUST do something about his weight, settled on a more general guideline, along the lines that he just had to realize that he can't eat everything he wants to any more. He's now lost a significant amount of weight and looks at least a decade younger than he did a year ago. Both men, I think, thought of losing weight as a means to the end of having a longer and more fruitful ministry.

SINK REFLECTIONS by Maria Cilley-The Flylady, Bantam Books, first published in 2002.

I'm more than a little embarrassed to list this book as one of my top three. Much of it is unbearably sappy and goopy, and the theology is more than a little off kilter. However, I'm in the ranks of the many who've found The Flylady's ideas to be very helpful in the area of housekeeping. You can subscribe to her e-mail service; I did so and unsubscribed after about a week--I couldn't stand all that stuff flooding into my inbox. I have read and re-read her book, though, and now that we've moved into a newer, much larger, house, I'm planning to follow her idea of drawing up checklists for each area of the house. (Gretchen Rubin is also big on checklists.) Her best idea as far as I'm concerned, an idea which I'm still struggling to implement, has to do with establishing routines so that you automatically do household tasks the same way each time instead of having to re-think them every time you do them. Other cleaning/housekeeping books also make this point, especially the ones written by Jeff Campbell and The Clean Team. The idea is that you have a certain way you clean an area and you do it the same way every single time, trying to get faster and more efficient along the way. "Routine" in this instance is not being used as an adjective to mean "dull, ordinary, everyday," but as a noun that means "a set way of doing something." After all, gymnasts and figure skaters have routines. They do the same set of moves, exactly the same way, for thousands of repetitions, in order to get it as perfect as is humanly possible. There's no Olympic event called "kitchen cleanup," but there should be! If I know that I have a plan to vacuum and dust the living, dining and family rooms, that everything will be done without my having to go back later and do something I forgot, and that there is a certain amount of time that this task will take, I'll be much more inclined to go ahead and do it.