I follow several blogs on happiness. My absolute favourite at the moment is Hunting Happiness Project. My long time favourite must be Escape The City, not directly focused on happiness, yet providing inspiration to those stuck in a rut/ City/ corporate job, which I also was for a while. I also follow Alain de Botton on Twitter who always manages to capture the essence of our modern life dilemmas into 140 characters. Therapeutic and inspirational. Here is a pic I saved from one of these blogs, five simple rules for happiness. Easy, huh? 🙂
I read a lot of stuff (books, articles, blogs, etc) on the so called self development. I started with meaning-of-life material, progressed to self improvement, had a little detour reading the bible, koran and buddhist literature, then onto philosophy, switched to brain/ mind/ NLP, and finally has recently got into reading on happiness. I will have a post on who I follow on the subject currently, in case it’s of help to any of you.
Today let me focus on 2 things which I think are worth reading and having a thought about. 5 Things That Will Make You Happier is a great and short summary on the key ingredients of happiness. In fact, you could decide and become happy right now. Practice happiness like yoga.
For me, these 5 things seem repetitive so I will further boil them down into 3, to make it even easier to digest and apply to a day to day life. No 1. Positive thinking – easier said than done, but possible with merciless thought monitoring and laser cutting all negativity in its tracks. DO NOT let your mind wander off on a negativity road. Every time you catch yourself on a negative thought – replace it with a positive one. More on this in the photo below. No 2. Gratitude. You could either use the exercise suggested or check out my previous post and write down daily or weekly 3 things you are grateful for. Easy peasy. No 3. Give back. It’s simple – giving makes you happy. You don’t need to be rich to give. You could start giving right now. Be it money, or help, or kind word. I support a charity helping sick kids from emerging country. I am also doing #26actsofkindness in memory of the little angels who lost their lives in Newtown. If you need inspiration and want to join in, search on twitter with the above hashtag. If you want your money or something back, you can use kiva or kickstarter, where your money is allocated to a cause of your choice. Why not. Or you can watch Amelie, a perfect cinematic example of what giving is and what it can do to your life.
I liked No 4 in the original post about strengths, it’s new to me. Will try to use it as an exercise.
What I would like to close with today is this beautifully written post on death by Roger Ebert who apparently has recently died. I am not familiar with his works, all screenwriting blogs I follow however have tremendous respect for him and from reading this short work of his, I can see why. And this is the thought I am going to leave you and myself with today – today practice living like you will die in the next 60 seconds. Now get up and go do that one thing that could change your life. Ta!
Image courtesy of the Hunting Happiness Project that I follow religiously.
Last year, in the midst of the middle age crisis, I promised myself that 2013 will be all about happiness. This btw sounds like a log line for Jude Apatow’s next movie 🙂 I have spent last 5 years in the high profile, high paced, intense corporate job which made me realise several things once I paused for a maternity leave: a) I hate matrix organisations, b) my life is spent on blackberry, in meaningless meetings and on tasks which make no difference in the broader scheme of things, c) I am unhealthy, stressed, unhappy and I miss writing.
So I quit. And I want to focus on happiness this year, not higher income or promotion or any other artificial goals. I want to be healthy, happy, fulfilled, I want to invest into myself and relationships with people who are close and precious to me.
Two months later, and I can report that I have moved from fast paced, always on London to a picturesque fishing village of Volendam in the Netherlands. I have started my first script based on my sci fi novel. I plan to find a job that makes a difference. And I am starting this blog. So far, so good.
In the last two months I’ve had a crash course on how to become a landlord and move to Europe. I plan to share high level learnings here because it took me a while to get all this info together. I will share my experience of getting to know the Dutch and their way of living. In fact, my next post will be on shopping in the Netherlands. In between, I will share some of the tips and tricks that make me happy.
And with that, let’s go…
Nomad of the Universe 