The Happiness Project: Or, 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

I wanted to start a collection—but what should I collect? I didn’t have enough passion to justify an expensive collection, and I didn’t want to collect junk. I decided to collect bluebirds, because bluebirds are a symbol of happiness. As far as I know, this connection arose from Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird. A fairy tells two children, “The Blue Bird stands for happiness,” and she orders them to set out to find the Blue Bird for her sick daughter. After many adventures, the children come home, unsuccessful—to find the Blue Bird waiting for them. “It’s the Blue Bird we were looking for! We’ve been miles and miles and miles, and he was here all the time!” This unsubtle moral, of course, was quite fitting for my happiness project. For no other reason except to keep my resolution to “Go off the path,” one afternoon I stepped into an oddly comprehensive hardware store that’s tucked into my neighborhood. It’s small yet carries everything from lightbulbs to wooden puzzles to vacuum cleaners to fancy candles. I found myself staring up at an array of realistically carved, battery-operated “Breezy Singers” birds, which are outfitted with motion sensors so they move and twitter when anyone walks by. I wouldn’t have considered buying one

As a simplicity-lover, I'm not much of a collector, but I have continued to collect bluebirds, in a small way. I have two framed drawings of bluebirds in my office. A good friend sewed me a bluebird figure that sits on my desk lamp. My sister Elizabeth, who loves mugs, has given me several bluebird-themed mugs. Most spectacular: at Christmas time, I have a tabletop tree that's decorated solely with bluebird ornaments. It's fun to look for these ornaments, but they're pretty rare, so I don't feel overwhelmed.