Happiness Project: Look Out The Window

I'm working on my Happiness Project, and you should have one, too! Everyone's project will look different, but it's the rare person who can't benefit. Join in -- no need to catch up, just jump in right now. The Happiness Project isn't just a book and a blog; it's a way of life, and each Friday's post will help you think about your own happiness project.

One of my resolutions is to "Cultivate gratitude," and one way I do that is to try to remind myself of how precious an ordinary day is.

In the tumult of everyday life, it's very hard to stay attuned to the familiar beauty that I see constantly. One reason I like to go on vacation is that when I return, I see again, with fresher eyes, the landscape of my neighborhood.

We don't have any "views" from our apartment. We have great light, which is a real luxury in New York City (and if I had to pick between good light and a good view, I'd pick good light), but even though we face an apartment building, and another apartment building, and the top of a shaft, there are still beautiful things to see when we look out.

From our kitchen, we can see an building face that's covered with ivy. It's a great pleasure to watch the breeze make the mass of leaves tremble and sway together, like a wave running vertical. At night, it's cozy and intriguing, in a Rear Window-ish kind of way, to see the snippets of people's lives being enacted across the street, one floor on top of another.

And we enjoy seeing Exercise Guy. His window is closer to us, and we have a good view of whether he's doing his morning exercises on his elliptical machine, or not. My girls get a big kick out of checking and announcing, "Exercise Guy is exercising today!" Or "Exercise Guy hasn't exercised one day this week!"

My office is in a teeny room on the roof of our building; it was converted from a storage room that had taken the place of a water tower. My window there looks out on air-conditioning equipment and the tops of ducts where they poke out of the tarred roof. Not much to see.

But even there, I've been trying to discipline myself to look at these window and not just let my eyes slide over the familiar scene without taking in the quality of light, the way the trees on the terrace across the street look against the sky, the patches of cloud that float above the roofs.

As Samuel Johnson said, "It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery, and as much happiness as possible."

Or as Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot by watching."

So look out your window. Really notice what you see. Watch how the view changes over the course of the day, and as the seasons change. Try to pay attention to the way things look. Three quotations is too many for one post, and I just quoted this line from Gertrude Stein a few days ago, but I can't help myself: "Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful."

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Comments

[LightUpAmerica]

thank you for your lovely article. It's nice to read something like this on HuffPo when the politics of the day get to be too much. we need to remember that there is a fascinating world just outside our windows.

[mamacat]

Great blog, thank you!

[Jonahson]

Look futher. As far as the horizon and beyond the shore across the sea towards the East.
There are many things to learn from the East. They gave you yoga; they taught you meditation; they gave you strange words like compassion, gullible, enlightenment. I hope people will learn more about the East. Material wise they have nothing much to offer you but spiritually the sky is not the limit, neither is heaven and hell. There is a saying from the East about people who knows only their surroundings and thinking it is the World.

"A frog who lives in a well, looking up it see the stars perceiving as the whole world."
"A frog living under a coconut shell."