Bouncy

A happy life is the product of many components.  For those people of whom you are jealous, the components fit together like a mildewed jigsaw puzzle found at a Seventies beach house.  But who really spends time re-piecing together cut-up cardboard?  Some of these components you create for yourself and others are dictated by the higher-ups: your parents, the media, your college, your friends.  Most of the happiness components are as obvious as they are elusive—the hardest and most essential to-do list we’ve got.

You should have a job that is fulfilling, meaningful and lucrative enough. You should have a diverse group of friends, a handsome significant other and a functional family to fulfill you socially, sexually, romantically. You should have hobbies and interests—well-developed and unique.  Intellectually, we mostly know what it takes to feel happy, but the laundry list rarely lines up like you dream it might. When you have a great job, you are hopelessly single, and when you have a great boyfriend, you’re more than likely unemployed.  Unfortunately, for the mortals among us, it sometimes seems this is how happiness works.

Like many 24-year-old upper-middle-class white girls, I’ve bought into the idea that exercise is a small but crucial happiness factor.  Exercise has many obvious benefits that can be summed up under “hard-bodied.”  But magazines are constantly spewing statistics about how exercise is more than physical. In addition to toning your bod, exercise makes you happy and smart and beautiful, or so says Cosmpolitan (a dubious source of information as there can’t possibly be 101 new sex tricks every month).  Nonetheless, I’ve read this stuff enough that I’m bought in.  In college, I had myself convinced that I was happier and more productive when I was getting regular exercise.  This was a handy conclusion to bring forth when I’d rather be at yoga than working on my thesis (read: always).  

My commitment to exercise has waned over the years. I’ve been into kickboxing and yoga; I’ve convinced myself walking is equivalent to running; I’ve also been into a strict beer and Swedish fish regime.  If good teaching hinges on consistency, so too does a rocking bod. This is a mindset I've yet to master.

Last summer, I was fed up with exercise and essentially stopped doing it. The gym had become mind-numbingly boring, and even the fleeting thought of going was excruciating.  A couple motionless months passed, and I started thinking about happiness factors—reevaluating my placement of exercise in this amorphous blob of contentment.  When you’ve made a decision to stop doing something, it’s easy to convince yourself that it’s stupid, anyway.  But after a while I was feeling a little funky, and I wondered if my swearing off of a good thing was partially to blame.

What I realized is that if I’m to believe Cosmo’s credo that exercise makes you happy, I should pursue it in ways that are enjoyable.  This realization brings me to my new favorite form of exercise and the point of all this: Urban Rebounding.  

Urban Rebounding is a chic name for trampoline-ing.  It’s offered at your local YMCA, and I highly recommend it.  It involves bouncing on a mini-trampoline that is slightly updated, but mostly similar, to the one you had in your basement growing up. While bouncing along to remixed pop music, you attempt a series of complex punches, kicks and other assorted rebounding moves. I’m not sure exactly what makes it so urban, except that I'm doing it in Brooklyn.  Point is: it’s really fun, I spend most of the hour laughing with my new rebounding gang, and still end up sweaty and sore the next day.  

So there you have it.  The link between exercise and happiness is pretty legit, but if exercising itself makes you want to kick a puppy, the link gets tenuous.  The happiness components are only viable if they actually make you happy.  That should be obvious, but it's not. 

The solution, then, is apparent: Urban Rebounding. The cure for what ails us.