Self-knowledge is crucial to happiness, but it's challenging to know yourself. Sometimes, I find, I can gain insight by asking myself questions that make me take stock of my interests and values.
For that reason, I asked myself, "Who are my patron saints? Of my Happiness Project, in particular, and for myself generally?" (A "patron saint" is a saint who has a special connection to a person, place, profession, or activity, or in more casual terms, a person who serves as a particular leader or example.)
Here are my six patron saints:
Benjamin Franklin: practical, curious, inventive.
St. Therese of Lisieux: showing great love through small, ordinary actions.
Samuel Johnson: wildly eccentric with a deep understanding of human nature.
Julia Child: goofy yet masterly; light-hearted yet authoritative.
Winston Churchill: indefatigable, indomitable.
Virginia Woolf: intensely attuned to the power of the passing moment.
Well, Julia Child and Winston Churchill are probably rarely paired together in the same discussion, but they both represent very powerful ideas to me. It's interesting -- the posts I've written about these figures are among my favorites of all the posts I've written. I love thinking and writing about my patron saints.
Who are your patron saints? Why?
I'm working on my Happiness Project, and you could 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. Each Friday's post will help you think about your own happiness project.
* Speaking of Samuel Johnson, my next book takes its title from Johnson. Johnson remarked, "To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends." My next book is called Happier at Home. What a pleasure it has been to write this book! If you'd like to be notified when it's available, sign up here.
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Samuel Johnson: 18th century, wig wearing man of literature, who created one of the first dictionaries of the English language.
Samuel L. Jackson: Starred in movie set in 18th century, wore a wig in Pulp Fiction (which passes for literature), created one of the first movies in the English language about venomous snakes infesting an airplane.
http://www.readbookonline.net/stories/Ferber/70/
abrim with self-awareness. But it's disguised as detailed perceptivity of others, especially in vanity of manners and looks.
For some reason I can't say Edna Ferber without the saying "of all people". Presumably there is a buried memory of something, but I don't know what. I can't recall any relatives with a habit of that saying.
"Of all people," huh.
You know, you, of all people, may have some inner feminist/liberal hidden somewhere deep within your psyche. Who knows, mysteries abound. ;)
She is unsparing and curiously, though not undeservedly, unsympathetic toward "soft" women ("Flora was the acknowledged beauty. [...] Under her great gray eyes were faint violet shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. Her slow, sweet smile give the beholder an actual physical pang. Only her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and as sentimental as a hungry shark" -- now, now, Auntie dearest ;)); but this harshness strikes a somewhat false chord, as if she tried too hard to dis-identify herself with the feminine. And so her plucky and persevering Emma McChesney appears almost a caricature of a woman, she is so bereft of vulnerability and softness.
You know, of all people, Aunt Edna could have written that ill-advised HP sex journal, part 1. :)
So my first thought is: Auntie Mame, as portrayed by Rosalind Russell: She fights against bigotry and conservatism and for open-mindedness and liberalism with charm, humor, and a fabulous wardrobe.
Okay, so she isn't real. It's a start.