I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to make a trip to France with my daughter and while there we visited

Gieverny, the village in Normandy where Impressionist painter Claude Monet lived and worked for decades.

We visited Monet's former home and flower garden and we walked around his famous water garden.

That water garden is featured in dozens of Monet's most

famous masterpieces which show the trees reflecting in the water, the arched bridge,

and of course the water lilies.

It is unbelievably beautiful.

What I hadn't known, however, was that Monet created this pond.

In the 1890s, he acquired land,

and after a lot of argument and objections,

got permission from the local authorities

to divert water from an arm of the river Epped

so that it would run in front of his home.

The pond created by this diversion became his famous water garden.

He built that Japanese inspired wooden footbridge. He planted the wisteria that covered it. He

planted the water lilies that cover the surface of the water. What's interesting

to me is how much effort Monet dedicated to giving himself the conditions in which he wanted

to work and to give himself the inspiration he sought.

I'd assume that these scenes painted by Monet occurred around him naturally, like the stacks of hay, fields of poppies, or cathedral that are so well known from his work.

But that wasn't the case. Just as Charles Darwin went to a lot of

trouble to create his thinking path around his country house so that he could conveniently

...