Universe works in mysterious ways. I have been having a go at freelancing on elance, and one of the projects I worked on was about millennials. I am not sure if I am one or if I am a Gen X’er, I am somewhere in between. Anyway. Through the research for this project I discovered some cool stuff like Complex magazine and Hitrecord project. With Hitrecord in particular, I wish I knew about it before!
Hitrecord is a brain child of Joseph Gordon Levitt who, as I always suspected, is a very cool guy. Hitrecord is basically a co-creation or crowdsourced art platform. It’s very, very indie, and so brilliant, check it out. The best kept secret, recently becoming more and more popular, with impressive quality of talent on the site.
I’ve done some writing, photography and even video blogging on Hitrecord, for the first time ever! Things that Hitrecord ‘makes’ you do 🙂 Check out their latest contribution request with the Fantasy Q&A. Ouch! 🙂 You can find my first ever cartoon there too. It’s just such an amazing project that you feel inspired to make art, whichever way you can. Check out my records here.
Everyone on the site is talented, and it’s hard to define top 3 or even 10 records. In fact, you can replace tv and whatever else you are watching online, with just watching/ reading other people’s art on Hitrecord. It’s so refreshing and so real.
Anyway. Here is the latest favourite record of mine called Evaporation, I mean how genius is this?
I talk about different things that make us happy here, on this blog. Self development or self improvement is a big one. At some point I read almost no fiction, and exclusively on self development. I complimented that with reading numerous blogs on the subject. And you know what – becoming more productive, smarter about life, discovering yourself and bettering yourself as a person does make you happy. Try it yourself. Pick up a self improvement book you always wanted to read and read it in a couple of days. If you need ideas, on my kindle right now is Just Get On With It by Ali Campbell. I’ll be posting more self development book ideas in future posts. In the meantime, enjoy this quote from The Hunting Happiness Project.
I am going through a massive career change. I am trying to change what I do from corporate to impact. I am guided by the amazing Escape Manifesto, and still it’s not easy. Lots of stuff to figure out on your own. No one said it would be easy, right? At least I am making some pretty cool discoveries about myself, my values and motivations, and what I want in life.
I posted 14 Most Powerful Ted Talks For Disruptive Career Change before. And then I ran into George Mobiot’s career advice. Don’t ask me who the guy is, Wikipedia will advise better. All I know is he writes for Guardian, so I assume he is British, and he is what is now called a thought leader, which in his case means he is a great thinker with strong views and he can write. I loved his career advice so much, that I decided to cite it fully below.
Remember when you decide to change something about the work you do, that decision to change is already a massive first step. If you are currently also in transition, congratulations! May the change be as positive and transformational as you want it to be.
So my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she’s twenty-six and she still doesn’t own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones – their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world – on their walls.
I must confess, I am a bit of a hypochondriac. I love reading about health, watching medical shows and I do follow a couple of doctors on twitter.
So for those of you preferring a medical angle on happiness, I absolutely have to share Strategies for happiness: 7 steps to becoming a happier person. Web MD is a go to destination for hypochondriacs 🙂 No, seriously, they produce great content. Easy to read and always informative.
I like how the article talks about genetic predisposition for happiness but also says that despite this, we can and should choose to be happy. My favourite is this quote by Dr Tom G Stevens: “Choose to make happiness a top goal. Choose to take advantage of opportunities to learn how to be happy. For example, reprogramme your beliefs and values. Learn good self-management skills, good interpersonal skills and good career-related skills. Choose to be in environments and around people that increase your probability of happiness. The people who become the happiest and grow the most are those who also make truth and their own personal growth primary values.”
This is essentially a one paragraph recipe for being happy. And it also sums up neatly some of the big themes we cover on this blog.
There are also several mentions of various books on happiness in the article. They all sound like worth checking out. Another one I recently came across is Mindful Compassion by the professor of clinical psychology at the University of Derby, Paul Gilbert, which he co-wrote with a Buddhist monk. He talks there about meditation on kindness.
I have to read it.
This photo by Hancheng Li (my source for its origins is Quora however) cheers me up every time – it captures the essence of happiness beautifully – child like, innocent, in the now. I hope it makes you feel happier. High five, Universe, and have a terrific Sunday!
In the village I live people seem to obsess about 3 things – cleanliness, windows decor and flowers. Everyone here has lots of flowers in their gardens. And because their gardens are open (facing the street, no doors), the flowers are for everyone to enjoy (as well as clean front terraces, windows and window decor).
I definitely don’t like cut flowers because I think it’s a waste. We kill a living creature and decorate our house with its body until it decomposes. Nothing romantic or nice about this. Living plants are a different thing, however they also die, before us, and this deterred me from having them for a while (also I am horrible at watering them regularly and so they die even faster 😦 ).
But having lived here for a couple of months – and read about ongoing demise of bees, poor things – I gave in. I accepted the short lived nature of living flowers. I accepted that they will die after a year and I will need to plant new ones. And so I got two. They are now sitting opposite my living room door and cheer me up whenever I look at them. Ah, the power of flowers (or any other live being) to give us happiness!
When I have time and space, I will plant my favourite blossoms – lilacs, acacia, cherry trees, jasmine, tulips, peony, and lots of wildflowers. The aromas that garden will have in spring and early summer!! Stay happy, fellow nomads, and get a living flower, if everything else fails to make you happy 🙂
If you are trying to radically change what you do (I am at the moment) or are thinking about it, this playlist should provide the ideas and inspiration. If you are an overnight success story or not, keep trying! How else will you know? 😉
We covered it here before – giving back, helping others, asking yourself, as they say in the Bucket List, has your life brought joy to others? In his post for Linkedin, Bruce Kasanoff proposes a great idea – thinking ‘How can I help this person?’ every time we interact with a live person, in any situation, business or personal. I think it’s an amazing re-framing idea. And as we know by now, re-framing is one of the keys to happiness. I am going to apply this immediately. And btw, let me know if I can help any of you in any way, will be more than happy, as long as it’s legal… Have a happy weekend, my fellow nomads!
As we say on this blog, art therapy is great for happiness. My favourite art is surrealism, Picasso, Dali, et al, my favourites are usually the contemporary art museums, the painting I am obsessed with at the moment is Bosch’s Pleasure Gardens. And no, not because he was Dutch 🙂
The sad thing is I can not draw. Or to rephrase, I believe I can not draw. Or even more precisely, I have not decided I can draw yet. Remember Picasso’s famous phrase that he can not draw but he does it anyway because that’s the only way to do it?
But I have concepts in my head. So I have to use various surrogate means, like collages and computer graphics (which I am also not too good at 🙂 ) to get whatever things are in my head out. You have to get them out, hence the therapy.
Above all I like conceptual art. The medium, how the art is delivered is not that important to me. I have recently found an art blog (Hello, Fig) that I quite liked, some works there made me smile. But what I also liked about that blog is how the creator experiments with the medium. Collages, brave rework of existing works, etc. Let it be an inspiration to us – everyone can make art. Just figure out the way that works for you.
I promised to share a work of mine which I thought Hello, Fig would like. Here it goes, Cry Of A Fox, inspired by several years in London.
The list is very cool, my top favourite is the national park. Maybe there I will finally have courage to get on a bike. Last time I cycled was in Japan, when I went to get some burgers, and it does not count, because I was driven by desperation (had to have meat 🙂 ). And a stunning video of Dutch landscapes, you do see stuff like this here a lot, for real. ATB, my fellow nomads!
Who said it? My friend Justin I believe. Eckhart Tolle is a bit like Marmite – you either love him or hate him 🙂 Yes, he is slightly out of this world. Yes, he holds weird TV meditations where for 45 min he stares at you and talks in a very slow paced, almost whisper. Yes, he is deeply religious. But for me personally, his The Power of Now was one of those pivotal books that had profound, almost life changing impact. And I get it, it may seem obvious – live in the now is the secret to happiness, but when I was reading it, to me, it was not. And so it was a massive eureka moment. Almost enlightenment. I leave you with this quote from Eckhart Tolle on Facebook. If you are anxious and worried and lost in the moment, do this and see if it helps you become balanced, and calm, and happy again. It does work…
I’ve spent too much time on the subject of happiness lately 🙂 Now back to Holland, my current place of residence. It’s been raining for 2 weeks, pretty much non stop, so the weather is not too exciting at the moment. I am compensating by watching a lot of ted.com, eating wonderful bread, cheese and fish. Oh they are amazing.
I also decided to stop saying ‘the Netherlands’, which is bulky and long and too official, and until proven wrong, will say Holland. I hope it does not offend anyone.
To top you up on info about Holland, have you seen this cool video? I personally think it’s too modest – they have way more cool stuff here. But they probably tried to keep it cool 🙂
IamExpat, one of the many fantastic service centres helping expats relocating to Holland, published an amazing list of expat blogs about Holland, which I am very excited about. It’s like wikipedia of expat living in Holland! Looking forward to great tips!
Can’t see, these two blogs – this one and this one, on the list, I liked them, they are both by Brits in Holland.
Leaving you in this state of information overload. If you’d rather go back to the subject of happiness, watch out for my next post…
It’s easy to put us into this mode, isn’t it? Unknown noise, unexpected movement, fleeting moments when peripheral vision imagines it saw something…
I have recently realised that most of my life I have been in a fleeing mode. I could blame my Soviet past (I was in the system for 12 years of my life after all) when risk taking was not part of life and the prevailing mentality was to mind your own business and survive. I could probably find a myriad of other excuses…
I have a history with fear – I was mugged (heading to celebrate the International Women’s Day), ended up in A&E and neurosurgery. To this day, one thing I regret is that I ran from the attacker. I still fantasise about turning back and fighting or at least facing him, instead of running away.
I suffered from nightmares when I was younger. I realised later that nightmares were a sign of internal conflict and that they could easily be dealt with (this was after I learned about NLP and namely Russian school of happiness – they call themselves wizards – Simoron).
I found out about amygdala reading Seth Godin and brain literature (human brain fascinates me). It was one of those ‘aha’ moments. Suddenly the source of many of my fears was clear. It was biological and it could be re-programmed.
I realised I wanted to be brave. Deal with my fears. Grow a pair.
A near death experience and child labour (same thing, if you ask me) provided further perspective. And suddenly it became easier to be fearless. One of a few things I loved about the experience.
I am not giving into my fears as easily these days. Whenever flight or fight alarm goes off and my adrenaline spikes, I bring it under control and choose fight mode – not consistently yet, but at least definitely more often.
The biggest fear I have these days is that I won’t accomplish something I really want to do. First, that I won’t start. Then, that I won’t finish. Then that it won’t be good enough. I am working on it. This is something my amygdala can worry about it in the meantime.
Can you get fixated on the pursuit of happiness? Absolutely! Happiness junkies (a good example in today’s article), fixate on it so much that inevitably lose the object of their pursuit out of their view entirely. Desperately wanting to be happy will only make you unhappy.
Happiness is a rather delicate substance. A bit like Higgs Boson – if it’s there, it’s around us, flowing through us, surrounding us. But try and stop it, measure it, and you lost it. In happiness, like in love, once you start chasing it, you lose it.
Happiness is a state. Our attempts to crystallize it, make it into a memento, find a formula for it are only our vain attempts to overcome our mortality. Let it go. Accept that not always you will be happy. And hence enjoy even more when you actually are. Instead of chasing it, focus on surrounding yourself with people, things and experiences that do make you happy. And even more importantly, again like with love – if you lack happiness in your life, start making other people happy. Do kind things, bring joy into lives of friends, close ones and complete strangers. The karmic law, the law of attraction, the cycle of the Universe – whatever you call it, this WILL make you happy.
And as so wonderfully put by the Hunting Happiness Project this morning, here is a fantastic mantra for mini meditation on the go. Accept what you have, where you are and what you are. Trust Universe that everything will be fine. Stop swimming against the current. Flow. And have a happy day!
Deep breathe.
Acceptance.
Let your heart open to trusting.
Exhale.
Repeat as needed.
Nomad of the Universe 