{This is post #3 of 31 for The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge - Get Started Now.}

The take home lesson is to always enjoy where you are. Now. Happiness is love. Full stop. - Dr. George Vaillant 

I stopped by the pharmacy to buy a box of tea. The tea section is next to the magazines. I rarely read The Atlantic but saw the headline, "What Makes Us Happy?" I read the first few lines standing. Absorbed, I sat down and read the article to its finish and then I cried in the tea section of the pharmacy.

Is there a recipe for a good life?

If there is a recipe for happiness, the man who conducted the study, Dr. George Vaillant, knows the ingredients and how to combine them. "The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years," writes the author, Joshua Wolf Shenk.

Rereading the article today, it is first the content, of course, that strikes me. This is an article about a remarkable group of men, a remarkable amount of data collected over a tremendous amount of time. But it is Shenk's ability to weave narrative, notes, data, vignettes of these men's lives and their struggles - into a cohesive and compelling whole - that makes it worth reading. And worth studying.

The art of curating

The word "curate" has come into vogue this as The New York Times points out in, "The Word 'Curate' No Longer Belongs to the Museum Crowds." Now it's trendy to see yourself as "curating" your world. "The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes," writes Alex Williams in the article, "has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting."

But this man, Dr. Vaillant, shown through Shenk's lens, is no fly by night hipster curator. He has dedicated his life to the Grant Study. "For 42 years, the psychiatrist George Vaillant has been the chief curator of these lives, the chief investigator of their experiences, and the chief analyst of their lessons." And the article succeeds in sharing a glimpse of what Vaillant has discovered over the years.

The Rounding Influence of Storytelling

"If it was to come to life," writes Shenk, "this cleaver-sharp science project would need the rounding influence of storytelling. In George Vaillant, the Grant Study found its storyteller, and in the Grant Study, Vaillant found a set of data, and a series of texts, suited to his peculiar gifts." I would argue that even the best storyteller needs a vessel to get his story to a larger audience. I believe Shenk's article gave a vessel and a life to the story that it may not have otherwise gotten.

Best article for 2009: What Makes Us Happy? by Joshua Wolf Shenk at The Atlantic

Notable Mentions: three more projects on happiness that caught my attention this year:

- Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project (in which I'm humbled to have been featured)

- The Geography of Bliss - Eric Weiner

- Unlikely Friends

- Bonus: The best book on writing I read this year - Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide

Quotes from the video from  Dr. Vaillant, if you don't have time to watch the video right now:

"Put yourself in positions where positive emotions are likely. You can take up gardening, where what you're trying to do is make the poor little plants grow. Not win prizes at the horticulture shows. As soon as the gardening becomes doing it for me, then you get third prize and the best garden club in town doesn't invite you when you're life sucks." 

"It's alright that young people can do the things that they can do. The youth that the old envy is accompanied by the miserable process of getting from twenty-five to thirty-five. We've got all this health and all this youth, and you're scared stiff, that when it's all said and done you're not going to amount to a hill of beans."

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