The Weatherfolk

It’s the little things, really.

A mid-afternoon visit to a seaside castle. A jog in the park on a rare sunny day. A great novel scooped up in a charity shop for only £2. Seeing family (and pets) over Skype every week. Homemade pies from the local farmers market. A warm bubble bath on a cold Scottish day. Finding a little gem of a Mexican restaurant in our neighborhood. The sun setting beneath the Edinburgh skyline. Sharing meals and coffee and wine with friends. Marveling at the tides on an island in the Firth of Forth. Praying with and for a colleague. Crafting the most perfect Cinnamon Ciabatta French Toast for Saturday brunch.

These are the kinds of simple pleasures that have dominated our days over the last month, and I can’t think of a better start to any year than this one. When I read a blog post by our friend Will last week, it all made sense. He quoted part of an interview between Harvard Business Review writer Gardiner Morse and Professor Daniel Gilbert, and the more I think about it, the more true this theory rings in my own life, and probably in yours.

“The psychologist Ed Diener has a finding I really like. He essentially shows that the frequency of your positive experiences is a much better predictor of your happiness than is the intensity of your positive experiences. Somebody who has a dozen mildly nice things happen each day is likely to be happier than than somebody who has a single truly amazing thing happen. So wear comfortable shoes, give your wife a big kiss, sneak a French fry. It sounds like small stuff, and it is. But the small stuff matters.

We are learning and will continue to learn how to maximise our happiness. But that still leaves the big question: “What kind of happiness should we want”?

Science will soon be able to tell us how to live the lives we want, but it will never tell us the kind of lives we should want to live. That will be for us to decide.”