Introducing the All-Parish Read for 2023!
The Good Life:
Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness
Join us in reading “The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.” The authors, Dr. Robert Waldinger (MD) and Dr. Marc Shulz, (Ph.D) are directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest longitudinal study of its kind. The study has followed the lives of two generations of Americans from the same families for more than eighty years. This book is about the accumulated insights and findings from this study that has carefully observed how people have lived their lives over the course of many decades. What steps can we take and what decisions should we make to increase our chances of living a happy and fulfilled life?
First Parish will a series of programs that explore this question this fall and winter and then host a larger program sometime next year. We hope you can pick up a copy of the book (two will available in the Church Library to check out) and join us for our discussions.
Dr. Waldinger begins the book with a quotation by Mark Twain:
There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickering, apologies, heartburn, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
This year’s all-parish read invites us to a time of self-reflection – to reconsider how much we focus on worries and conflict and instead focus our energy toward the things that make a truly good life.