Mind your own happiness, thanks.

( Orpha’s birthday cupcake-love)

We should try never to let our happy frame of mind be disturbed. Whether we are suffering at present of have suffered in the past,there is no reason to be unhappy.  If we can remedy it, why be unhappy? And if we cannot, what is the use of being depressed about it?  That just adds more unhappiness and does no good at all.  — His holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

The good news and the bad news:

Much ado about HAPPINESS this sunny season.  First, it’s summer… and that’s supposed to make instant Happy, right?  No school.  No alarm clocks.   I am home with the kids for the summer, and that’s a really happy thing.  For me.  Mostly.   The kids however are having a harder time keeping their happy on.  I mean, it’s HOT, right?  And everything EASY FUN to do equals money, it seems.  It’s a challenge.  Things that seems perfectly fun to me are met with “groan, not today….”  So, I am trying to just let it be.  I am also attempting to pursue some ideas even when met with the gripes, in hope that it’ll catch on.

Me?  I am totally into the “life’s too short” thing right now.  It is hard to balance the things that bring happy with the things that ought to be done category though.  I had a huge fit of battle with this incongruence after we got home form the beach.  On vacation, even with kids along , there is a great deal of “scheduled enjoyment.”  You plan meal times, walks, beach time, sightseeing… all (hopefully)without the crap of life.  You come home and POW!  the normal crap du jour is waiting plus whatever you avoided while away.  I tend to get way bogged down in that.  I am trying to get better at NOT.

Here’s my plan for penniless joy.  I am trying to give this a place in my ocd list of the day.  ( You make those too, right?)  To list the billions of things that I want to get done, and to include some joy.  I never do that.  It’s usually what is allowed after the list is exhausted for the day.

This is all very shorthand– You can fill it out and make it meaningful for you.

The PLAN

~BE in beauty

~Notice what’s  right in front of you.  All of it.

~Do something NEW.  Learn a new something.  See a new something.

~Read

~BE with a friend, or someone you love.

~Count yer blessings.  Really.

~MAKE. Create. Art. Something useful.  Something awesome.  Something good to eat.

~ Be inspired.

~ Change something.  Make it better.  Or just different.

This is a work in progress.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  Please– let me know if you have any summer home-runs… I’d be glad of it!

I’ll leave it with this…

“Sounding the same call for joy whenever possible, the Hebrew sages say that when you are first welcomed into Heaven, a record is revealed to you of all the many times in your past when you could really have been happy and really enjoyed some moment but failed to do so, and then you are called to repent of each and every one of those moments.”

THE P.S.

Oh my STARS!  It has taken me a week to write this one damn post!  In the meantime I have had a stomach/gi virus that is just killing me!  So I am getting caught up on lying around, and doing some baby knitting, and I just started a book last night called The Geography of Bliss– One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Place in the World.  I’d picked it up at the library last visit along with some travel books to research all of the travel that isn’t happening this summer.  The book is pretty great thus far…

Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, has covered a multitude of catastrophes and maladies from more than 30 countries over the past two decades. For The Geography of Bliss, however, he decided to tell the other side of the story by visiting some of the world’s most contented places. his site

It’s funny and thoughtful and often wise.  I was drawn to it immediately because  I ( and many of my dearest) have had so many years of  “happiness resides in _____, and we just need to find a way to move there.”   Fill in your choice–  you probably know what I mean. So if you have fits of that sort of thinking, or are having a little wanderlust epizootie, like myself, you may want to check it out.

I think Jimmy said it best–