Years ago, when I was pregnant with my firstborn and didn’t know any better, I bought a pair of truly terrible black maternity pants from a store called Motherhood Maternity (repetitive! and redundant!). Instead of a proper waistband, they had a super-stretchy panel at the top to fit over your big belly, and the pant legs were made of a thin, static-generating polyester. I wore them maybe twice and eventually lent them, along with all my other maternity wear, to a friend—which is how they survived our house fire and came back to me years later, just in time for my third pregnancy in 2014.
By then, I had learned that nearly all pregnancy-related purchases are a scam and was actively looking for ways to avoid buying anything else, so I decided make the most of those awful pants. I cut off the legs, turning them into a pair of dressy cuffed shorts, and wore them over black tights because it was winter.
It turns out winter shorts are great: they look smart enough for work, but are also practical for playing on the floor with little kids. They can tone down the formality of a blazer but also somehow make a plain sweater look more polished. Like magic. So when I no longer needed maternity shorts, I decided to upgrade to a leather pair I found on eBay.
I wore those shorts for a couple years, but they always bothered me because the crotch bulged slightly whenever I sat down, so I eventually sold them on consignment and bought a different pair, also from eBay. The new shorts were an improvement, but the leather was too thin and the side clasp dug into my hip. I wore them anyway, but kept searching for something better.
Finally, in early 2020, I found another pair that were exactly what I’d been looking for: perfect cut, nice fit, good-quality leather. Of course, I wore them only once before the whole world shut down, and now they hang quietly in my closet, still waiting to realize their full potential.
Even though I won’t be wearing them anytime soon, I like looking at these shorts because they remind me of the joy of incremental improvement. So often, we think in big, sweeping terms when we’re trying to make our lives better, but I’ve learned over the years that small changes can lead to happiness and satisfaction too. Besides, sometimes incremental improvement is all we have.
Recently, I heard about the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) at UC Berkeley, where they study the science of happiness and have developed a set of practices that are scientifically proven to help people live happier lives. Each practice is pretty small—usually just a 10-minute exercise you do for a week or two—but they apparently make a big difference in a person’s outlook over time. According to the GGSC:
While we’ll never have a sure path toward happiness, we believe these practices can create lasting improvements in individuals, families, and communities. Over time, they can evolve into habits, and from habits become a new way of experiencing the world.
My mind was a little blown: People can train to be happy? And this is a real thing, backed by science?
It’s funny how I naturally put my time and energy into fine-tuning inconsequential stuff like my wardrobe, but it never even occurred to me that I could make my own happiness a goal—or that it might actually be achievable.
Or is that not funny and just sad? Either way, it’s something to consider: Are there incremental improvements that I could be making to my brain to increase my happiness? And might I be disciplined enough to do it?
My years-long pursuit of the perfect leather shorts tells me yes, but my natural pessimism wonders if I am already too far gone. We shall see, we shall see.
:) Teresa
ps. One thing I do know is that drawing makes me happier. And you’re invited to draw with me at a free workshop with The Believer magazine this Friday. Register in advance here.
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As someone who's very new to the idea of interior design (nothing like a pandemic to make you fixate on your living space!), I've recently really glommed onto this notion of incremental improvement. I'm not even sure that it's incremental in the sense of progress toward an end, since these choices take place over a long enough period that I've changed in between, so much as an increasing confidence in making pleasing choices in the moment and forget about the future. I suppose, though, it _is_ incremental in the sense of exactly what you're showing in your entries: a kind of fossil record of changes in yourself that have calcified in the choices you've made. Archeology of the self!