Figuring out the Final Happiness Quotient.

Two events coming up for me, one very long-range and one occurring next week:

We were telling Jim’s cousin about it last night and she was all, “So will you get a railpass?” and stuff like that, and we were saying, “Oh no, we’re not that far along.” So for now it’s just a hazy picture of our walking down a Parisian street or visiting a castle or two. And that’s fun. Actually planning the trip—figuring out flights, and whether or not we will, indeed, get a railpass, and where we want to go, and if we want to stay in an apartment or a (very) modest hotel—can be fun, too. I actually like planning trips. And then the actual trip itself, with its hours-long flights, searching unfamiliar places for something to eat, navigating to the museums, catching the trains, etc., etc., etc. All sorts of things can go wrong, all sorts of things can go right, and there’ll be, yes, all sorts of things in the middle. One of us might get sick, or fall down some of those stone stairs in a castle and crack a patella—who knows?

The short-range one is our Cherry Creek Chorale concert next week. We started rehearsing in early January, meeting on Tuesday nights and one Saturday morning. I’ve missed two rehearsals, something that’s unheard of for me, so I don’t feel quite as invested as usual, but as soon as I finish this post I’m going to sit down and go over at least the tricky stuff. We’ll have our regular Tuesday meeting tonight, and then next week is CONCERT WEEK. That means two rehearsals and two performances. I have great plans for the stuff I’m making for the Friday-night reception: four, yes, four types of chocolate cupcakes: with chili powder and bourbon glaze, with chocolate stout (a kind of dark, strong beer) and bittersweet ganache frosting, with root beer flavoring and root beer-cream cheese frosing, and plain with luscious buttercream frosting. All this from someone who no longer eats much in the way of sweets! I’m also planning to make little apple pies, but we’ll see if I really do that, and one of my signature savory cheesecakes, and probably my Great Green Stuff. (Maybe, maybe by next week we’ll have the new website up and running, and I’ll post links to all of these wonderful items. I’m not going to do it now, though, as they’d just be outdated when the great move happens.) I’m not sure how well attended this concert will be, as its theme is a bit . . . weird. (“Movies and Masterworks”–and we are singing some great stuff, honestly! You should totally plan to come if you live in the area. (As noted above, we’re doing some website stuff, so I’m going to direct you to the Chorale website if you’d like to read my posts on some of the music we’re singing. Be sure, if nothing else, that you read the “Magic, Sleep and Death” post, because it has a video of the modern classical chorale composer Eric Whitacre describing how he got started in his career and it’s a total hoot.) It’s hard to say how many people will attend. We’ll hope that there won’t be a March snowstorm that weekend, but anything’s possible.

So we could invest months of planning and hundreds of dollars in a trip that ends up disastrously. We could invest hours and hours of rehearsals and not have a great crowd. The temptation is to say, “Oh, it was a failure. It didn’t end up being a happy experience.” But, as my longtime-but-unconscious-collaborator Gretchen Rubin says, at any point you can be gaining happiness, even if the event itself doesn’t turn out well, or even if it does. (I just went onto her website to find the podcast episode where she talks about this, thinking it was the most recent one, but it wasn’t. You should listen to it anyway, though.) So at any point in the French trip process someone could say to me, “Are you happy right now?” If I’ve just realized that the flights I booked won’t work, or if we’ve just missed a train, I would say, “No.” But there would be plenty of times when the answer would be “Yes,” including right now, as I write this and think about how great it will be to be back in Paris. Or if someone were to ask me that tonight at 9:15 as we’re wrapping up rehearsal, I’d probably say, “I’m happy to be heading home!” But there have been many points when I’ve enjoyed the rehearsals or the writing of my “Behind the Music” posts. You have to count in the whole shebang, from glimmer of idea to end of event. If you enjoyed the preliminaries, you should count that enjoyment in as you figure out the Final Happiness Quotient, or FHQ, of the entire arc. Don’t let one or two negatives outweigh a whole slew of positives. (I have a tendency to do that—that is, what I just said not to do.)

It ain’t a failure if you enjoyed the process!