Metaphorical broken windows

I was unloading the dishwasher, but I was thinking about broken windows.

More specifically, I was thinking about the “broken windows theory,” having just read a short essay about this by Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin. The original broken windows theory posits that a city block populated by buildings with broken windows is more likely to attract other kinds of litter and eventually more significant problems such as street crime and arson as well. Conversely, if city officials make it a priority to fix broken windows, the likelihood of greater graft and criminal activity on the same block will be diminished.

Gretchen Rubin extrapolates this theory to maintaining a household, and I was thinking about that as I cleaned up the kitchen this morning. Her point is that if you can identify your own small acts of household negligence, you might be taking a step toward forestalling larger ones. Since I started the day with a sense of mild despair about the state of the household, washing the dishes seemed like a good way to test her theory.

I generally have a fair amount of ambivalence toward housework, especially on work days. If I don’t keep the house neat and clean, I start to feel a slightly suffocating sense of overall disorganization and frustration. But if I spend time doing housework, I remind myself that I get paid to write, not vacuum, and no one in my family except for me either notices or cares if the rugs have been vacuumed or the shelves dusted. And I also remind myself that I often use housework as a deliberate diversion when I don’t want to write. I’m definitely not the only writer I know whose furniture is never so well-polished as when she’s on deadline with a complicated story.

But this morning, I decided to test the broken windows theory when it came to my own home. I decided instead of vacillating between the priority of cleaning and the priority of earning a paycheck, I would spend the first hour of my workday cleaning up. Rather than toggling constantly between household tasks and deskwork, the way I often spend my work hours, I decided I would just focus on getting all the cleaning done in one hour that I could.

So I unloaded the dishwasher, reloaded it with breakfast dishes, cleaned all the bathrooms, dusted, and started a load of laundry.

And just as I’d hoped, after an hour, I did not feel an hour behind on deadlines and writing commitments. I felt renewed. I felt happy to be working in an orderly house. I felt more motivated than usual to think about what I’d make for dinner, since I knew I’d be cooking in a clean kitchen rather than trying to prep one meal and pick up from an earlier one at the same time.

True, there are days when I just don’t have the luxury of indulging in an hour of housework before I get to my real job. Sometimes deadlines are tight enough, or projects have accumulated enough, that I just have to forget about the clutter and grime and sit down at my desk instead.

But today, it worked for me. I cleaned, and then started my workday with a clear, dare I say clean, conscience.

I’d taken care of my broken windows, and I knew the rest of the day would have a more orderly feel as a result. Sometimes, fixing broken windows – literally or metaphorically – really is the best approach.

Plans that work and plans that don't

We made our plans for yesterday over a week ago. It was a so-called professional day for the kids, so I condensed my work day into a three-hour morning session and postponed most of my deadlines until the next day. The plan was to leave at noon to pick up Tim’s friend Will, drive to Kimball Farm in Westford, have a picnic at the picnic area there, play a round or two of mini-golf, indulge in Kimball Farm ice cream cones, and head home.

But nothing quite worked out the way we planned. Will and Tim wanted to spend some time at home first playing a video game which went on much longer than we expected. It was 1:30 by the time we left the house, rather than noon. We arrived at Kimball’s with our grocery bag full of sandwiches and chips, only to find signs all over the picnic area saying that food from outside, as opposed to food purchased at Kimball’s, was not allowed. We pretended not to see the signs and sat down at a picnic table anyway, at which point we were swarmed by bees.

We moved our picnic away from the general eating area and over to a bench closer to the mini golf area. The bees were no longer a problem and no one seemed to mind that we were eating our own sandwiches, but then Holly pointed to a different sign – one indicating that mini golf was closed for the day.

“Oh well,” I said. “We’ll finish our picnic, get some ice cream, and think of some other outdoor activity instead.” The kids suggested we go to a park we like in a nearby town: Holly could play on the playground equipment there and the boys would toss a Frisbee around. I gave them money and sent them off to the ice cream counter while I cleaned up our picnic.

But the ice cream counter was closed as well, so we reorganized our plans once again: we’d go to an ice cream parlor in another town and a different park near there. It would take a while to get to, but we had the rest of the afternoon free.

The ice cream parlor part of that plan worked out well, but when we got to the park nearby, we were confronted with yet another sign, this one saying that the playground equipment had been removed from that park and new equipment would soon be installed.

It did seem as if an improbable number of our plans had fallen through, but we all agreed that it didn’t matter too much. We were having fun anyway. We’d had our picnic and some very good ice cream, and the boys said Holly could play Frisbee with them since there was no playground available to her. She wasn’t sure she could handle a game of Frisbee, but the boys were patient and taught her the basics. I sat in the sun and watched.

As I sat there, I thought about something Gretchen Rubin writes in “The Happiness Project”: namely, that one criterion for something being fun is that you look forward to it. When I read that, I realized that for me, it’s often not the case: I usually tend to underestimate how enjoyable something will be, with the excuse that pessimism allows the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised.

And I’m pleasantly surprised a lot, I admit; everything from parties to coffee dates to vacations tend to be more fun than I expected. But after reading Gretchen Rubin’s thoughts on this, I’ve started to think maybe I’m missing out; maybe I’d be having even more fun if I allowed myself to anticipate good times a little bit more confidently.

On the other hand, yesterday proved that sometimes plans don’t really work out, so you might be anticipating a bunch of things that don’t end up happening, like our picnic/mini-golf/ice cream stand scheme. So maybe what actually helps most is just anticipating with confidence that something fun will happen, though you might not know exactly what.

I hoped, and suspected, that the afternoon with Tim, Holly and Will would be a good time. And as I sat in the late-afternoon sun watching them play Frisbee, I conceded that it was. Despite all our plans falling through, we were outdoors and happy and drinking in fresh air and sated with ice cream. Not the fun we’d planned on, but a great time nevertheless.

Four in a (hot) tub

I looked around at the damp, pinkish faces of my three family members. “Well, we’re not exactly hiking on the East Maroon Trail or biking the coast of Maine,” I muttered, “but at least we’re all doing something together.”

My husband and children are well aware that there are a number of activities I’d like all of us to engage in together: hiking, biking, trail walks through the woods. These are all activities we have ready access to, both in the places where we tend to vacation and even right outside our door. But it’s hard to convince the other three, especially all at the same time. Sometimes Holly is interested in a bike ride; sometimes Tim is in the mood to walk through the woods to the ice cream stand. Occasionally Rick even sees the benefits of a walk down the lane together after dinner. But somewhat to my discouragement, we’re not yet a family that does a lot of outdoor recreation as a unit. Saying “not yet” is optimistic, I concede, as if to assume it will happen eventually; but I can’t give up on that hope yet.

At the same time, I’m trying to be more realistic. In fact, two years ago one of my January resolutions was to get my family involved in more outdoor activities together, but this past January it was different: my resolution was to stop stewing about how everyone in my family chooses to spend their time. Whether they’re immersed in watching hockey or sewing doll clothes, I need to stop being so judgmental about their choices, and also so easily let down when other people don’t want to do what I want to do.

Gretchen Rubin writes in her book The Happiness Project about how she came to accept the cardinal rule “Just because other people think it’s fun doesn’t mean you’ll think it’s fun”; that rule helped reassure her that she wasn’t missing out on something vital when she decided she didn’t particularly enjoy something like scrapbooking. I need to keep in mind the converse, though: Just because I think it’s fun doesn’t mean other people will think it’s fun.

Nonetheless, it’s emotionally healthy for families to try to spend time together. Which is why last night after dinner, I took comfort where I could find it: in the fact that we’d all decided to soak in the hot tub together. The kids love the hot tub that we’ve had only since we moved two and a half months ago; they treat it like a swimming pool, a never-ending source of great fun. I haven’t taken to it quite as quickly, but at the same time, I know it’s good for me to put aside other responsibilities once in a while – cleaning the kitchen and finishing an article, in the case of the after-dinner hour last night – and jump in with them. Rick tries to take advantage of it too.

So that’s how we ended up all in the hot tub together last night. Yes, I would have felt prouder of us had we been hiking or biking. Or skating. Or boating. But this is us. We don’t do all those other things, at least not regularly. We hot-tub. It’s not what I expected. But it’s pretty good. And those two simple sentences – “It’s not what I expected. But it’s pretty good.” – are sometimes the best words we can hope to say about family life.

Having fun

One young member of my Sunday school class this past weekend wanted to be sure it was absolutely clear to me that she would rather not be in class. “I wanted sooooo much to stay home but my parents made me come to church today,” she whined during the early part of the class when the kids are encouraged to share their joys and concerns.

“What would you be doing right now if they’d let you stay home?” I asked.
I think she thought it was a trick question, that I was trying to trip her up somehow, but I wasn’t. I don’t know this particular child very well. If she had gotten her wish to stay home, she’d probably be having more fun, and I was curious to know what fun for her looked like.

I was thinking about this already because I’ve been reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, which also talks about the importance of being able to define your own sources of fun. When Rubin posed the question on her blog about what people find fun, what I found most telling was what some people identified as not fun: games with their children that involved toys (though these same parents liked other activities with their kids, just not playing with toys), going to parties.

As Rubin’s readers articulated, sometimes things we associate with fun because of their general reputations, such as toys and parties, turn out not to be, or just aren’t to our tastes. Going too far in the direction of labeling different activities as “fun” or “not fun” can be unnecessarily limiting: assuming you don’t like parties could mean never going to another party, and there’s always the chance that the occasional one will turn out to be pretty worthwhile. At the same time, knowing what makes you happy can be both self-affirming and practical: self-affirming because it helps confirm in your own mind who it is that you are, and practical because it helps you put your time to good use rather than squandering it.

When my children were really young, time to myself was so rare that sometimes when the kids were gone for several hours at a time, I’d almost literally find myself walking in circles, not knowing what to do with the gift of free time I’d been handed. Although these days I have plenty of time to myself at home, I felt a little bit the same way last Friday when I went up to Portland, Maine, to help my father with an errand and found myself with two free hours to spend there all by myself. I’d been to Portland several times before, but always with the kids. Being there alone – and on a mild sunny spring day, no less – left me almost overwhelmed by the choices.

Should I go for a powerwalk by the harbor? Try on clothes at one of the artsy boutiques on Middle Street? Sip coffee and read magazines at a café with a waterfront view? Watch the boats come and go from the dock outside the condo balcony? I tried hard to pin myself down on my definition of fun so as to make the best possible use of my brief but precious stint of time.

In the end, I used my two hours well. Powerwalking didn’t happen, but the shopping, strolling, coffee and reading all did. I was glad I’d identified those ahead of time as things I was likely to find fun.

Of course, it’s important not to limit yourself. There are always new forms of fun yet to be discovered. But as I tried to tell my Sunday school class, knowing what really makes you happy is part of knowing who you are. And it’s a good feeling when you can zoom in on just what it is that you find to be fun.