The Harper Happiness Project

After reading the The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Funwe decided to begin the Harper version of a happiness project. I'm Kristin, and I'm starting this blog with my sister, Megan, to chart our one-year journey toward a better life. We live in Harlem, with my husband, two kids, and dog.

I think both Megan and I are reasonably happy already, but there are always things that could be better--so those things are what we are going to be working on this year! Gradually, we're hoping to tackle all the parts of our lives that we would like to improve. We decided to work on exercise, first, since we are both pretty pathetic in that department. Living in New York I think we end up walking a lot in the course of our daily activities... but actually going out and exercising? Well, I don't think I've done that in years. So goal #1: Healthy bodies.

Part of our healthy bodies focus is going to be on eating well, too. In the last few months, we have depended way too much on takeout. It's expensive, it doesn't taste great, and most of it is not especially good for you. We just moved to a new apartment with a great kitchen, and we want to take full advantage! Finding the time to cook is always a struggle, between work and kid stuff and just being exhausted at the end of the day. So hopefully we'll be able to figure out how to find a balance between good food and the rest of our lives.

Aside from getting healthy we also need to learn to take more time for ourselves! So we'll be having other smaller goals thrown in as well such as "do one new thing a week" or "take time to write".

In writing this blog, we hope to hear from other people who are struggling to improve their lives in some of the same ways. There have got to be many of us out there, working towards the same goals!