A Hundred Years of Happiness

It's a state of mind, of course.

It took me about 36 days to learn this last year. My summer writing practice was themed around happiness. Around awareness and intention, actually, for that is what it takes. 

Happiness is a spiritual practice, a mental practice as well. It's a great example of how thoughts, awareness, and intention go a long way to creating our reality. It's why people can survive terrible things, because they companion themselves and their experience with life-giving thoughts, awareness of what is exists alongside one's own suffering, and intention to notice where the small things in life testify to something beyond our thoughts and our experience.

I remember reading about a woman's experience with something so horrendous that most people would wonder how she could survive it, how she could find even a small measure of happiness within it. She spent her days watching the paths of butterflies that summer, and the ways they flew in and out of the place that held her captive. She reflected on her awareness that there is life beyond, around, and even within her experience, and this awareness gave her strength and courage to meet the experience of her days. 

That was her experience.

A memory came up on Facebook today. It was the writing from my blog on this day last year. I reread it for fun. I notice that sometimes as I am encountering my days during these summer writing projects, similar themes or awareness or insights rise out of my experience and my reflections. This one was about noticing the small things in life and allowing them to shape how we experience our lives, or at least the day before us. 

At the bottom of my daily writing, I always restate my theme and say something about it. Last year's was - A Hundred Days of Happiness is a daily writing project that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience. 

Interestingly, on this day last year, I wrote ~

                                        A Hundred Years of Happiness . . . 

I didn't notice it at the time. I noticed it only as I was looking back on that time, a time that each moment of my days was wrapped in an awareness of my own happiness. Blessings, The ways I am fortunate. My desire for peace, prosperity, good health, contentment. The small things in the day that make me smile, like how cool the morning are and how wonderful it is to open the windows and smell what makes the Earth green. The fragrance of nectarines ripening on the counter and the sweetness of strawberries in season. The ways sunlight dances on the leaves and the leaves dance on the breeze. The soft blue skies and soft white clouds peeking through the frame of trees outside my window. The orchid that hasn't stopped blooming since my last birthday.

Creating Space: Three Months of Showing Up for What's Showing Up is a daily writing practice. Turns out that a lot of this writing explores the landscape of grief. My mother died shortly before I began this writing, and this is what is on my mind most of the time.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.