Happiness is a Practice
I had a hard tiring week for a variety of reasons, so this week is going to be short and I am not, despite the title of this blog, going to beat myself up about it.
The way I write, I tend to put little ideas into my drafts folder and add to the overtime. Ideally I get ahead of things, so I eventually have full posts sitting there. It's been a while since I have hit that ideal and starting working means I have even less time to catch up on thing. Merlin Mann says "you aren't busy, you're time constrained." and that's true for me right now. Part of being in recovering and working at a craft like improv is making the time for the things you need to make the time for. It's driving from work to pick up your kid in the city, dropping them off at home, and then heading right back out to improv practice. It's closing your laptop lid immediately when you realize revenge procrastination has a hold on you but also noting that you need some selfcare. Time just moves forward. It doesn't wait. You have to be intentional.
The Birdcage opened thirty years ago today, so in its honor, I want to share one of my favorite stories about Mike Nichols that didn't make it into my biography. This is from an interview I did with Nathan Lane.
— Mark Harris (@markharris.bsky.social) 2026-03-08T16:29:22.685Z
It was going on one, two in the morning, and we were shooting what I felt was an important scene for me, when he makes an attempt to be quote-unquote straight, in a suit, and at the end of it he gets emotional and locks himself in the other room. And I felt like, I'm not getting what I want-I'm not happy with it. Mike was happy with it. He called me the next day and said, "I know you weren't happy with the scene last night. Believe me, we wouldn't have gone home if I had felt we weren't getting it." And then he sort of became my psychiatrist and said, "You find it difficult to be happy, don't you? You find it difficult to enjoy things." And I said, "Well, sometimes. Last night was about feeling too tired and not feeling I was reaching what I needed to reach for the scene." He talked to me then about when he was making, I don't know whether it was Virginia Woolf or The Graduate. He said, "I didn't enjoy it for a second. I was worried about so many things." And then he said, "You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you'll have hours of happiness."
And that's kind of what it is. You stop look around and realize that this is something good even if it's not what you think it should be.
I am about to do a show tonight. I am tired. I am down. I am going to look around before I head out on stage tonight and just take a few seconds to be happy that I am a live and I get to do something I love. Eventually a few seconds will be a minute and so on and so on.
