I think it was the photograph of the strawberries that did it. Or maybe it was the tea, the beauty of its delicate fragrance as the boiling water hit the tea leaves. Or slicing the bread and cheese. The grass-fed butter. The beauty of the colors on the plate.
I can look at my life through the struggle and dissatisfaction, the challenges and grief that are inevitable, or through what makes the experience of living wonderful. Thoughts are creative. Focus directs us. I'm thinking that if I pay attention to happiness, gratitude, and self-love, my life will get better. This idea, of course, is nothing new. Even in my own writing. What was it? Three years ago that I wrote The Summer of Self-Love?
It can be hard to sustain, though. We've just come through 15 months of pandemic and pandemonium, as a friend has called it, and we've spent a lot of time isolated in our homes, our thoughts, our positions and our perspectives. Fifteen months is plenty of time to create new brain furrows that carry the thoughts that shape our experience. But three months can begin to turn around what needs turning.
I started to think about this on Saturday and I was going to spend Saturday and Sunday developing the idea so that I could start strong on Monday, today, the day when the hundred days begin if I'd like to carry it through August 31. I had a headache the whole weekend and didn't do a thing. I have a headache this morning too, but I'm not letting that stop me. It may just be the last 15 months rearing up to tell me that it is what it is.
It also may be a reminder that the best approach is not to over-plan but to let it be a landscape of discovery. And lightness. I have some ideas. I've jotted some things down, a loose structure for days. Themes, maybe, to help me remember and to give me some bones to build over. Things like Thirteen for Thursday. I make and share 13-second videos called Thirteen Seconds of Sabbath. They remind me that I can stop anywhere, anytime, to collect myself, to take a second or thirteen to pause and notice beauty, to check myself back into my own bliss, and give me a serious pause in the week for appreciation and noticing.
There's also Me-First on Monday to set up the week well. Tidy Tuesdays, to get something done. Whimsy on Wednesday, because I like to live with lightness and Wednesdays usually feel anything but light. Friendship on Friday because friends and social connection are important. Sabbath on Saturday, so I don't lose myself in striving. Succulent Sundays, so I don't lose the sense of gorgeous giftedness in life.
Sign posts to my own happiness.
And a few minutes spent walking down those paths each day just might change everything.
So let me just say right now that I don't know if it's going to work. I go into these writing series open to what might grow and understanding that it might fall on its face. It's part of the landscape of discovery. But for today, here's to the beginning of gathering up all the good things in life and setting them in front of my eyes, ears, hands, nose, and tongue. The deeply human ways of taking things in and processing them. For me, that leads to reflection and away from rumination. I'm hoping it will open joy and wonder to me again so that I'm more likely to notice that part of life.
What do I need today? So many things. What is one thing, just one, that I can do and be deeply present to? That's the question of the day for the next one hundred days.
A Hundred Days of Happiness is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.
Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012 and every year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.
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