Nourish the world with your words, yo.

I've been thinking about disowning some of my genes lately. I have a few healthy, happy, long-living optimists in my family tree - most of them fans of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, a major champion of positive thinking. But I've got plenty of ancestors who played out more tortured hands.

My own habit had always been to write about the things that ticked me off in a given day. If I kept a journal at all, I kept it to vent.

Looking for the perfect day is not going to make us happy, because that day isn't going to come.

The last introvert in a world of extroverts. Silence: my response to both emptiness and saturation. But silence frightens people. I had to learn how to talk. Out of politeness.

In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.

When you study postpartum depression, there is a very clear understanding that in communities where you see more support, there is less depression.