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How to be Happy

Here is one of Tina Garrity’s oldest memories of being happy: When she was a little girl, spending time with her mom’s Italian relatives in Philadelphia, the aunts, and uncles, and cousins would make homemade pasta and lay it out to dry on the dining room table. Then they’d walk up to the local candy store and buy those little strips of papers with the candy dots on them, and Turtles, too. Then they’d come back and maybe play Uno or gin rummy. And then they’d all sit down to a big dinner.

Later in life, after she married, had children, and settled with her family in a big, beautiful house in the suburbs, her idea of being happy was hanging around on the couch with her five girls and talking, and just laughing with them.

“Just gut laughing,” she says. “All my happiest memories are of being with my girls and my husband.”

On a recent rainy winter evening, she sat in front of a roaring fire in that beautiful, big home in Madison, mostly empty now that her girls have grown up. While sipping a cup of tea and looking into the fire, we talked about the time when her youngest girls were about 11 or 12, and growing up fast.

I told her I remembered her back then. Our paths would often cross at meetings or other gatherings where people were getting organized to help others in the community. To the rest of us, Tina Garrity was the Madison mom who had it all.

But, as we’re sitting there on that recent evening, sipping tea before her roaring fire in her big quiet house, she admits that she wasn’t really always happy.

“Growing up and even when I was older, I thought happy was something outside of myself. Something you could get like, maybe, those little candies on the paper. And at Christmas, getting those baby dolls. And, maybe, going to school dances. And those moments with my girlfriends. And listening to Beatles records. And those moments with my family,” she says. “And those things did make me feel happy. But I wondered whether I was really happy inside. It made me feel badly, because I knew how fortunate I was. I had a wonderful husband who had a wonderful job. We had a lot of things. And I thought, ‘I should be happy.’”

Her first thought?

“‘I just need a job.’ I knew my stay-at-home-mom job was ending. So, ‘I have to find that job that will make me happy.’”

But she couldn’t think of a job that would make her happy and that made her confused.

“I was trying to find the thing that would make me happy,” she says. “And all those years of acquiring things were fun. The things were fun. But they did not bring lasting happiness.”

As she started to question the very nature of happiness, and whether she was truly happy, she was invited to attend a Happiness Club in Fairfield. She went, and “it was like a lightbulb went off.” She realized she had work to do. And then she went back to another meeting, and then eventually started up a Happiness Club of her own based in her hometown of Madison. Her club has been going strong for 10 years now, drawing attendees from all over the state. She’s had the chance to meet hundreds of seekers and experts in the field of happiness, and she feels like she has a bit more insight into happiness.

“Happiness is an inside job,” she says. “It really does come from within. And it’s not just about spouting affirmations and waking up one morning and saying, ‘I’m going to be happy today.’ It’s a practice. You have to work at it. You have to search out what brings you a sense of peace and serenity. I finally realized no one else could make me happy, that I had to take responsibility for it myself.”

Moving Through the Darkness

On yet another dreary rainy winter evening, one in a series of cold New England nights that seem like they will never end, I pull up outside the Scranton Memorial Library in Madison to check out my first Happiness Club meeting, so I can write about it.

Who would come out on a night like this, I wonder, other than someone doing this for work?

I consider myself a pretty happy person, but I’ve gone through some dark times when I honestly didn’t think I’d ever be happy again. I remember, during those times, I tried medicine, psychotherapy, yoga, meditation, journaling, gratefulness exercises, anything that would help me out of the darkness that surrounded me and threatened to engulf me. Some of the strategies stuck, and helped me get better. Others just seemed silly or superficial, made me want to roll my eyes. I don’t know what this night will bring.

I park, go into the library, and head downstairs into what I’m sure will be a sparsely attended meeting in the library’s community room.

The subject of the meeting that night is, appropriately enough, Dark Sky: Ancient Healing for Modern Times. Something about the ancient Yin/Yang balance of day and night. Work and rest. Masculine and feminine archetypes. Archetypes? I feel like I should know what that is, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I walk into the community room to find more than 40 people already comfortably seated. It is standing room only, until Tina’s husband, Kevin, starts pulling more chairs out of storage. He sets them out and retreats to lean on a table in the back of the room, a table that holds a little smiley face plate, one given to Tina from one of her daughters, with chocolates on it. Kevin turns to George Egan, also in attendance, sitting in the back of the room, and jokes that he’s the chair man. You know, chair man, chairman. Get it? They both laugh.

Tina Garrity moves to the front of the room.

“Hi everyone,” she says.

“Hi Tina,” they all chime back.

“I don’t know how many more people will show up,” she says, looking unsure as to whether she should start the meeting, or wait a bit more.

People are still walking in, taking off their sodden coats, shaking out their umbrellas and placing them in the corner.

Garrity says life is a journey, and that it can be difficult sometimes getting through it. She talks about how the Happiness Club has allowed her to focus on what’s important in her life. She notes that she hasn’t uncovered anything new or particularly dramatic.

“But sometimes I have to be reminded of things,” she says.

She tells us there are about 140 Happiness Clubs worldwide, including about five in Connecticut, mentions a newsletter, also a book called The Power of Kindness: The Unexpected Benefits of Leading a Compassionate Life, and talks about the importance of acts of generosity and kindness.

“Kindness is what leads to happiness, our own, and for those around us,” she says.

“That’s right,” someone in the audience says; there is applause.

Garrity takes a minute to remind everyone about a referendum coming up that will decide the fate of the local library and the library’s plan to expand. She encourages people to send letters into the editor of the local newspaper to help get out the vote. She talks about gratitude rituals, and the importance of writing letters of thanks.

Garrity, in her short introduction, is a walking, talking example of many of the principles happiness experts encourage. Reliance upon family. Expressing kindness. Becoming involved in, and building community. Establishing connections. Expressing gratitude. The meeting isn’t even 10 minutes old yet.

A guy named Paul Sprague gets up to introduce the speaker, his sister, Sanna Stanley. Head-on, he hits the notion that some people might find her particular approach toward happiness, through darkness, confusing, difficult to understand, or, perhaps, maybe, even nonsense. He is straightforward and disarming. I find myself listening more closely.

“A lot of people just don’t get her,” he says. “She’s not from here, and in my experience, not from now.” But, he says, she’s taught him a lot about darkness and “the way I live.”

Stanley takes her place at the front of the room. She says we are now in the season where there is more darkness than light. She promises to take us back to the time when the sun belonged to the day, and the moon belonged to the night. She notes that many of us are fearful of the dark and that a fear of the dark, and lack of respect for it, has contributed to problems like light pollution, which can have very real ramifications not only in terms of human health risks, but also ecologically for species that depend upon the orderly transition from day to night, and light to dark, for reproduction and survival. She encourages us to move through our emotional responses to have respect for the dark, rather than fear.

She asks us to try on eye patches, turning us into what looks like a big boat full of pirates, and we laugh and feel silly, but we put on the eye patches anyway. She walks us through an experiment involving a lantern and light intensity.

She ends with some practical suggestions. Shield your light fixtures properly so that they do not leak unnecessary light at night. Make sure the light points down, at your path or walkway, rather than up at the sky. Install motion sensors so that the light is on only when it’s needed. When it comes to lighting, employ the attitude of “less is more,” and “be creative.”

“The hardest part is turning the switch in your own mind,” she says, as she wraps up her talk. “The hardest problems are not fixed simply.”

She encourages us to see the good in the dark night, to see it as something that provides a respite, and a shelter from the activity of the day. She encourages us to differentiate between our need for security (yes, it makes sense to provide light at night on your walkway), and giving in to our fear of the dark (no it doesn’t make sense to use a floodlight in your fenced backyard all night, every night). “Take a look at the night every night for the next week,” she implores. “Please let there be night.”

I say my good byes to Garrity and the others, and walk out into the night. I realize the talk has created a small shift for me, that I am prepared to try to see the good in the darkness of the night in a way I had not before. And, yes, that makes me happy.

Doing the Work

When I met with Garrity at her house, she said attending the Happiness Meetings over the years has prompted her to do something of a deep study on the subject, aided by a small stack of books that she reads while underlining and making notes.

The books that she had next to her while she sat next to the fire that recent evening included the following:

• Zen and the Art of Happiness, by Chris Prentiss

• The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz

• A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson

• The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer

• 10 Percent Happier, Dan Harris

• Be Happy, by Robert Holden

• Gateway to Happiness, by Rabbi Zelig Pliskin

She puts down the cup of tea she is drinking, picks up The Untethered Soul and flips through the pages.

“This tells us to deal with what is, and then to not resist life’s events,” she says. “That’s what causes so much stress sometimes, is the resistance. It makes more sense to accept what is, and then let go. It’s easy to get stuck, but we don’t have to get stuck and stay stuck. That can lead to bitter. Anger. Negativity. Life is one long lesson in letting go.”

She says the books that are meaningful to her might not work for everyone, but that the key for any one person is to do the work that will reveal what is meaningful for that person.

“There are so many things we can’t control. But we can control our own attitude. And our attitude has such a profound effect. As for me, I can see that the law of attraction works. If I’m in a negative state, negative things keep happening, and are brought to me. It’s what I see around me,” she says. “If I can work to get myself in a good place, then I find that, through that positive attitude, that people are smiling back at me. I feel good things come into my life.”

While attitude is key, Garrity is also quick to say that spending time doing things you love, with people you love, is a key to her happiness as well.

“It’s those moments,” she says. “And those experiences that bring happiness, more than just things.”

Garrity says she has an acronym to remind herself of her own personal keys to happiness: GRACE. That stands for Gratitude, Responsibility, Acceptance, Caring, and Enjoy.

“Gratitude is something you can work at every day, whether it’s making a list or just making an effort to notice what makes you grateful. Responsibility, in terms of taking responsibility for your own happiness. Acceptance? Accept it. Don’t fight it. There are so many things we don’t have control over, so sometimes you just have to accept and move on. Caring. That means caring for yourself. I don’t know about you, but caring for myself is sometimes the last thing that I do. I get that voice going in my head, ‘Oh, you idiot!’ And I just have to be careful about that,” she says. “Enjoyment? Have fun. Do something that will bring out the kid in you. Smell the roses.”