Lessons for a Good Life

Find comfort in the familiar. Thrill yourself with the novel. Take risks. Love hard. Show your belly.

I’m writing this on a flight back from Greece, still coming down from a week hosting a writing and yoga retreat, one of a handful that I co-lead every year. I’m tan and tired and, despite a pretty nonstop week of organizing and logistics and teaching and ferrying a dozen people around a Greek island (all while fighting a nasty stomach bug), I’m feeling unusually calm, content, and thoroughly satisfied.

A few years ago, I wrote a book about feminism and happiness, posing the questions: Can move feminism beyond seeking equality with men and toward making women as much a default human category as men? What do women need to live good, meaningful, happy lives, and how can we build our cultures, laws, workplaces, and societies to allow more women the opportunity to find happiness? I spent a year and half interviewing women around the country, and reading everything I could get my hands on about the philosophy and science of happiness. The answer to “how do I live a good life?” is not, I regret to inform you, found on yoga retreats on Greek islands; you are not going to discover a life of meaning at a wellness gathering, and you aren’t going to self-actualize yourself into happiness.

But a good life is, in large part, a life where one’s basic material needs are met, and where there is plentiful opportunity — and plentiful support — to pursue meaning beyond one’s self; to settle into familiar comforts while regularly experiencing novel pleasures; to rise to challenges and learn that one is capable of persevering through adversity; and to forge connections deep and shallow and everything in between with other people.

I’m thinking of these findings today, on my plane ride home, as I try to put my finger on what exactly felt so good about the past week. I think it’s that, especially as women hit the life stage I am now in — late 30s — our lives often shrink down, fitting uncomfortably inside the four walls of a home. There are husbands and wives, babies and more babies or really big decisions about babies, jobs that only seem to grow more demanding and that for many white-collar workers are now done without removing one’s pajamas. For people in my age cohort, these trappings of adulthood can also come along with a deep sense of dislocation and instability: I have how little in my retirement account? Buying a house costs how much? My student loan debt is still how high? How am I this old, with this little to show for it?

For many women, life can feel very small at this particular age. There aren’t as many opportunities as there were in our 20s to meet new people — fewer big parties, fewer events to attend, high school and college well in the rear view. A core group of girlfriends may no longer be the sun around which all else in life revolves. And the demands of a more insular life scale up: Partners want attention (and you love them, and you want their attention too). Children want attention (and you love them, and so you want to give it without limitation). Work wants attention, and maybe you love it, or maybe you need it, or maybe you feel guilty or unsatisfied or (hi) like a little bit of a failure because you simply didn’t achieve all you set out to, and so you keep grinding away, and maybe one day you’ll feel like you’ve actually got a handle on things. Aging parents get sick. Partners get sick, kids get sick, maybe you get sick. Our bodies, and the lives we’ve built around them, age and grow a little bit more brittle.

Those are a lot of burners firing all at once. It can be quite a shock to look around and realize you haven’t left the kitchen in a long time.