Happiness for Beginners

by Katherine Center

He loved to chase, but the minute I let him capture, he suddenly felt smothered. I learned early on that I had to keep running to keep him interested. But after a while I got tired of running. After a while, I just wanted to be caught.

happy people are more likely to register joy than unhappy people. So if you take two people who have experienced a day of, say, fifty percent good things and fifty percent bad things, an unhappy person would remember more of the bad.” “Kind of that glass-half-empty thing.” “But it’s not just attitude. It’s genuinely connected to memory. It’s like, for unhappy people, if you ask them at the end of the day what they remember, it’s the bad stuff. But they aren’t ignoring the good memories, they just didn’t retain them.”

“The more you register good things,” she went on, “the more you will think about and remember good things. And since all you really have left of the past is what you remember—” “It changes the story of your life.”

Every night, you write down three good things that happened to you that day.”

The most important thing to remember is that getting what you want doesn’t make you happy.” “It doesn’t?” I asked. “Not for long. Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.”

“We’re not leaving you behind,” Windy said, meaning to be kind, but wielding that little pronoun “we” like a knife.

Instead of ignoring me, as any other thoughtlessly in love couple would have done, they purposely hiked slower so we could all be together. Like assholes.