“But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?” Albert Camus

I’m Jen, a friend of LeAnn’s (Lena).  As she mentioned in her post, I’m going to participate in Lena’s Happiness Project by contributing some thoughts on the elements of my life that create or foster harmony.  Maybe not just the happy ones, though, which is why I call it Life.  I agree totally with her working definition of happiness as a feeling that life is going well.

To focus on how well life really is going, I started a little writing project of my own earlier this year.  My intention was to document the happenings in the life of my family and, in particular, to get my head out of the weeds of life with kids: the constant need to mop the kitchen floor; the feeling of being stretched too thin while getting fatter and flabbier; the mental confusion of trying to talk to a pediatrician (or plumber, or colleage, or husband) about best approaches at the same time trying to ensure my new iPhone didn’t get shattered by my youngest and my oldest didn’t pee her pants.  It turns out, documenting things that go on in our lives has given me such a great sense of how well life is going.  It is exactly as Gretchen Rubin, the one who’s Happiness Project has inspired us, says: “Act as you want to feel”.

So, I’m excited to jot down the things that contribute to my harmony in hopes that the act of focusing on them will bring more harmony.  And so my first entry is on singing…

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