“Everything you do in life has the potential to add to your happiness, your joie de vivre. You can grab a cup of coffee and take it out and drink it while you’re driving or walking down the street, talking on your cell phone,not really paying any attention to the world around you, and not really enjoying your cup of coffee, or you can buy your coffee, sit down and drink it from a real china cup. Find a great place to sit when you have a good view of passersby. Rather than multi-tasking, why not be present to the moment and do one thing at a time?”
In Callan’s newest book, she reveals that she is a typical American woman “who often feels that she is not smart enough, not rich enough, not organized enough, not accomplished enough, and definitely not young enough.”
Taking cue from her grandmother who was very French and who she thinks was someone who had mastered the art of living beautifully; she embarks on a research project that would help her unlock the secret to finding one’s joie de vivre. She applied to the Virginia Center for a Creative Arts fellowship which enabled her to live and work in Auvillar, a little village in the Southwest of France.
After interviewing, shopping, dining, and cooking with French women from all walks of life, Callan shares some lessons she’s learned from the French:
1. Stop and focus. Be present in simple and familiar activities such as grocery shopping, gardening, cooking, sitting in a park, having a picnic, enjoying a bath, or even doing housework.
2. Be in the moment and be willing to change your plans when something unique and wonderful comes into your life.
3. Break the connection between spending and money and happiness.
4. Resist chasing after happiness and give happiness a chance to sneak up on you.
5. Be creative with less.
6. Dance.
7. Revive and realize some of your old dreams.
8. Tend to the gifts that nature has given you
9. Challenge yourself and break out of the familiar.
10. Appreciate the mystery that is here and now.
11. Work to live, don’t live to work.
12. Walk.
13. Protect your privacy.
14. Add in your repertoire a few tried and tested dishes.
15. Sit down with your family at least once a week to a real meal.
16. Keep the dining room table free of clutter.
17. Practice the art of “less is more”.
18. Learn to occasionally just shrug your shoulders and say, “that’s life!”
19. Open your eyes and notice all the beauty in your world.
20. Ask yourself where you might have gone overboard in one direction or another in your life.
21. Love your body as it is right now.
22. Enjoy your food.
23. Become involved in your community.
24. Develop conversational skills by asking questions.
25. Think romantic thoughts.
26. Wear good lingerie all the time.
27. Dress up.
28. Truly give to yourself.
29. Consider making a commitment to someone else.
30. Create a rhythm and pattern in your life.
Reading “Bonjour, Happiness” is akin to eating the French macaron. First comes the visual delight in beholding this pretty concoction, followed by the satisfaction of taking the first bite, and then the overpowering saccharine sweetness. On the whole, however, a delectable little pleasure.
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