Knowing Yourself Can Add to Happiness.

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This is another one of those posts that grew out of something I heard on the radio and then managed to find again. It was just a five-minute segment on some woman who lives in New York City and produces modern operas, running her office out of the second bedroom of her two-bedroom apartment. Her production company totals eight people, including her. New York Apartments are pretty small, so I can’t imagine how they all fit in and still get anything done, but apparently they do. She says that it would make no sense for her to spend $30,000-$40,000 per year on office space and therefore not have that amount of money to spend on what really matters to her: producing modern operas by new composers. She is completely focused on the business at hand.

So I was very intrigued by this story and thought Beth Morrison sounded like a singularly determined young woman and someone who was probably very happy, since she was fulfilling her dream in spite of its sheer unbelievability. She has no money of her own; although the story didn’t really go into this aspect of her life, she must spend a great deal of time persuading people who do have money to back her shows. And she has to pay her employees. (And she had to persuade them to work for her in the first place. “You’ll be sharing a tiny room with seven other people–you get dibs on the top bunk!”) That idea–the happiness of fulfilling a very improbable dream–was going to be the focus of this post.

She has achieved a real measure of success: “Starting with a practical dreamer’s sophisticated gamble on a new paradigm for staging contemporary opera, the company is now a potent creative force.” (New York Times)But when I did some googling about her I found a further aspect about her that I wanted to address: her self-knowledge. She came to this project with a great educational and experiential background: degrees in vocal performance and vocal pedagogy and years of teaching voice at the Tanglewood Institute. At some point she realized that her own voice just wasn’t up to a career onstage, and she found auditions to be nervewracking and paralyzing. As she analyzed her interests, her strengths and her weaknesses, she came to the conclusion that she’d be better off working behind the scenes. “I think the performer thing wasn’t right, because it was all about me, all about me. The minute that it could be not about me at all, and about everything else, then I relaxed and became very excited and passionate.” (NYT)

And this aspect of the story reminded me of two ideas gained last week from a couple of sources I’ve used before.

First, the teaching director of my Bible study class: “No tree can grow except on the root from which it sprung.” She was using the statement in a spiritual sense, that we can’t have fruit in our lives that doesn’t grow from the beliefs in our hearts, and that’s the most important aspect. But it’s also true in a more general sense. You cannot build a life that does not spring from your true nature.

Second (of course), Gretchen Rubin’s podcast. Gretchen and Liz discussed personality quizzes last week and how they can be genuinely useful in helping us understand ourselves. This type of self-examination is an obsession of Gretchen’s; her next book is an in-depth examination of her theory of the Four Tendencies. (It was supposed to be a brief booklet and ballooned into over 100,000 words. as Liz said, “Only you, Gretchen, only you.”) Several quizzes were mentioned on last week’s podcast; I ended up taking the Enneagram one, since it was free and could be scored online by the site, without my having to add up my points myself. I can’t say that I found this test to be too enlightening, as I ended up having two highest-scoring personality types: the Motivator/Achiever and the Thinker/Observer, with the Reformer/Perfectionist only one point lower. So I’m kind of muddled. But I plan to read through the thorough descriptions of my three top types and see what applies. The Reformer label seems to fit very well, as I tend to think that people should/can just change of I only tell them what to do.

It never works to force yourself into doing what you hate, not as your mission in life, anyway. I’d better end this and go read my personality descriptions. One thing I do know: I love writing these posts. By sheer serendipity I’ve fallen into doing something that suits me. I would write them even if no one read them, but I’m heartened by those who do!

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