What do we need in order to be happy

or playing with Venn diagrams when there's work to be done

It’s been a grim three weeks of January hasn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I find the long, slow onset of dark mornings, and evenings drawing in before I’ve even thought of an afternoon cup of tea, and the hours and hours and hours of deep black winter nights almost suffocating. While the light has been returning incrementally now for a month (it’s the 21st Jan as I write,) the dark months affect me every year a little worse. I have developed a habit of dreading more dark and more.

Today though, we not only have a little sunshine, but slowly slowly we approach the garden with the jobs to do. Yesterday the tunnels were planted up with sweet peas and ranunculus and anemone de caen. There are planted rows of ammi majus and orlaya grandiflora to add froth to weddings in May. Up the field right this second my neighbour Sue is tackling the encroaching grass and edging the beds with a dibber and a piece of string to keep her lines straight. Today Fabrizio and I will roughly top an unruly hedge of field acer and lay it so that the light, when it comes back, can flood the annuals patch.

So why do I feel more confident that all will be well? It’s not just that the chores are beginning to be done, that the list is having a daily line through something.

I have a great personal development coach (and friend of thirty years) called Alice Armstrong-Scales. Last Monday I spent the day with her and we talked about how valuable it is, from time to time, to examine the different things we need to make us happy, and to make sure we keep an eye on working towards having those things. I’m not talking Prada handbags or holidays in the Bahamas here - though there may be people who would put these in the enough section of the Venn diagram I came up with. Alice also strongly encourages people to spend five minutes each morning doing what’s popularly described as ‘Journaling.’ I think of this more of downloading from my head onto paper the swirl of thoughts which, unless marshalled, can make me feel as though I’ve been on a bit of a sick-making fair ground ride so whirling can they be. The written download is also useful because the discipline of it helps my brain to put into sentences how I feel about things. This makes it possible for me to express myself in language. When you can put into words how you feel about something you are less likely to scream in frustration and lash out (extreme example - but you know what I mean,) and more likely to say to yourself, ‘If this is how I feel, I can now work out what to do about it.’

So this morning I was journalling away as is my daily wont, and that marshalling brain of mine came up with a Venn diagram of what I think a person needs in order to be happy. I love the Ikigai idea of the secret to a long and happy life, and this is certainly drawing on that for inspiration.

Ikigai has lots of intersecting subjects which one can work on to make sure one achieves Ikigai. This five minutes journalling Venn diagram is simpler. I like simple things with clear options.

And this is what I put.

I think in life four things are necessary:

1 A creative routine: by which I mean that life cannot be all work or chore but some of the work can be made creative and if it happens routinely then you’ll be exercising your creativity every day. This could be as simple as top dressing the pots outside the back door to make them look ready for spring, or arranging the kitchen shelves in a pleasing manner. Fortunate is the person who loves to tidy a linen closet until it looks like something out of World of Interiors. My Mum here is a great example. Ok, she’s 85 years old so doesn’t have to go to work every day. But she manages her house, her garden, her sewing spot on the landing upstairs, even the dishcloths she knits while sitting with Dad in the afternoons, in a creative way. Her whole house is creatively arranged so that you look from kitchen through to sitting room past a series of still lives. Once a year from the greenhouse is brought to sit on the kitchen table a pale pink azalea which one of my mother’s brothers gave to my grandmother as a small plant for Gran’s birthday many years ago. This azalea is now almost too big to carry, and fills a large, old, terracotta pot - the earthy terracotta colour warming the cool, pale pink of the azalea harmoniously. Mum uses that creativity in a) the chore of keeping the azalea alive over twenty years since Gran died and b) bringing it in to stand it on the kitchen table when it flowers at the time of long-dead-Gran’s birthday. The view then from the kitchen, over the table, through the doorway to Dad’s piano, past the collection of bobbin holders on the chest of drawers, is an expression of Mum’s creativity. And she plays housy housy (playing housy is not said here in derogatory way, with Mum it’s her artistic nature being given an outlet in her domestic scene on a daily basis,) in one way or another most days - yes, her linen cupboard has shelves edged in strips of broderie anglaise she found at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate one year.

I’m banging on about Mum a bit here, but she’s an excellent example of this creatively doing chores business. Her garden is three quarters of an acre she’s carved herself out of a slice of fellside in Cumbria (they live in a barn conversion: they moved into a barn in a field.) Every day her garden needs her: every day there are chores to do in the garden: every day she walks down the garden and is soothed by the beautiful space she’s made.

She sews, she knits. Her career had her making log cabin patchwork quilts which she would sell at The Chelsea Craft Fair. Then she was curator of The Gawthorpe Collections when she moved north to help look after my father’s mother. When she has sewed everything she can for her immediate family and friends she sews for the Project Linus, making patchwork quilts for kids whose home and security are uncertain, so that they’ll have something beautiful that belongs to them, and which they can keep always if they’d like.

So there: Creative routine.

2 We need enough money to pay the bills. Here you can be Venn diagramy and try and make the thing you do to make enough to pay the bills part of your creative routine, or at least include a creative aspect to the routine. Of course you can make lots and lots of money, but try not to do it at the expense of other things on the list. To have enough you have to work out how much you need because then you can a) set out to make it, but b) you know when you can stop because you’ve enough to pay the bills, save a bit, put some in your pension and so on. The great challenge in life is to make enough while allowing time and finance for the other three parts of this Venn diagram.

3 I think we all need something to look forward to. Sometimes the making enough to pay the bills part can feel onerous and there don’t seem to be many obvious ways to increase creativity. When that happens we need something to know the onerous chores are worth the time because once they’re done we can have the thing we’re looking forward to. And it doesn’t need to be every day: it can be months ahead. But the promise of an activity we know we’ll enjoy makes it worth earning the enough or doing chores which may not feel very creatively energising today. I’m happy to report that I have a pizza night with girlfriends to look forward to this evening, two nights away with other friends planned for late April, hopefully a week by the sea at some point this summer, and, most exciting, I’m walking a marathon for charity with other friends in the autumn - an adventure which will allow me to visit Bamburgh and Alnwick Castles (Oh how I love a castle!) niether of which I’ve ever seen. So that’s plenty to be looking forward to.

Mum loves her visitors and she has lots of family and friends who drop in for a night on their way north or south. I just had a tot up, and between mid August last year and 2nd Jan this she had seventeen occasions to make up a spare bed or two. That’s a lot of visitors! She loves her diary to be full of promise: stories from fishermen on their way to and from the Helmsdale, grandchildren passing by with boyfriends they want her to meet, cousins, old old old friends of fifty or sixty years on their way to enjoy something. These visits give her lots to look forward to even when she seldom leaves Dad these days.

4 Last but not least I think we all need company. Not people generally sitting at our kitchen table all day long, but occasionally to look into the eye of a sympathetic human being. If you are busy enough with the first three on this list you don’t need a wild and frantic social life. But I think you need to look into the eye of sympathy from time to time. A person who understands where you come from, who you are: a person who won’t judge when you’re stressed, but will understand the stress: a person who will recognise the odd things you think are important and understand them with you. I think we need company to put ourselves in perspective: too much time alone and we either disappear completely into the earth, or feel as though we float above it, unanchored. So occasional, but not endless, company.

I’ve made a Venn diagram like this for Mum and realise how balanced her life is despite pressures of old age and Dad’s illness. She’s always been an inspiration.

Will you make a Venn diagram like this? I need to make mine: will the activity count as a creative chore? I think so.

So here you go. A little philosophical treatise for this sunny Tuesday morning. And now I will go and get creative taking the tops off those field acers, and putting the last succession of ranunculus to sprout. Have a lovely day all x