So…It’s the fifth day of The Sparkly Happiness Project.
How’s your week been?
For me, it’s been a week of opposites.
Great days full of huge strides. Jobs done galore. Attitude
happy. No sweary words out of my less than ladylike lips. Husband choosing to
exercise (we’ve been after him for health reasons for quite a while)
Grumpy days. (for instance this afternoon I went off on a
verbal bender and lost it big time with my family. Not so successful a day.
Luckily it’s still EARLY days.)
BUT: One of my overriding feelings this week has been one of
gratitude.
If you are miserable, stop looking inward, start looking
outward. EVERYTHING,
and I literally mean everything, is relative.
Yep. There are people
whose homes feature on Cribs. They have six cars, holiday abroad constantly, their clothes closets are bigger than my whole
house. People who have more money than sense or taste and couldn’t you just put
that to better use than they do?….blah BLAH blah.
There are also
children who dig pieces of plastic out of shit infested dumps in India for 12
hours a day, barefoot with no gloves on, just to make enough money to live in a
one room shack with a dirt floor and their 17 brothers and sisters sharing the
same bed in shifts.
My health isn’t
great and it limits me in unpredictable ways. That probably fits some of you as
well. But I know several people (more than I care to admit) who have cancer. They
are DYING, some of them quite young. What right do I have to complain when I am
so blessed?
If most of our
waking thoughts are WHY ME? POOR ME? THE WORLD OWES ME XYZ (fill in as you
like)…I will guarantee that only one thing will come out of it:
YOU WILL NEVER BE
HAPPY. NOT EVER.
Most of you reading
this will be nowhere close to either end of the spectrum. You will be blessed
with enough to meet your needs, even if you only manage monthly with one thin
dime left over and not much fun between pay days. Some of you will have much
more.
But think about
it. In all honesty, most of us spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t
need, to impress people we don’t really care about. Many of our stressors are
of our own making.
One of the
biggest challenges of our generation is to learn how to become
HAPPY
WITH WHAT WE HAVE.
Life could be
much simpler, our problems halved, if we worried more about what we DO to
IMPROVE the lives of others (and NOT necessarily in material matters), and LESS
about what we HAVE.
I’m not
suggesting in any way that it’s wrong to strive to improve yourself or your
lot, in educational & financial terms, because this whole project is about
becoming more fulfilled on a personal level. But it’s how we define personal fulfilment and what we do to achieve that that
matters most.
Right
now is the OLDEST you have ever been, and the YOUNGEST you will ever be.
What are you
spending your time and energy and life on? Getting or giving?
William James said:
The greatest discovery of my generation is
that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
HE WAS TALKING
ABOUT YOU. (and me)
Stop
looking in the mirror and under the microscope, examining every little minute
reason you have to be unhappy. Start looking out at the world and thinking
about all the positive ripples you could make in the lives of others around you.
Start with the people under your roof, in your neighbourhood, start anywhere.
JUST START.
It is my goal to perform one OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE act
of service for another person each week. I want this to cover my 4 month
project, but I can guarantee something.
It’s just as easy to develop GOOD HABITS as it is bad
ones. All it takes is dedication. If you put the same amount of time into it,
it’s yours. I expect that at the end of the 4 months I might be addicted to the warm fuzzy feeling that performing service for others can bring.
What are you dedicating your energy to?
Who’s with me? If you need some inspiration, watch the
film PAY IT FORWARD. Bring tissues.
So, go forth, multiply.
good works!!!!!…I meant MULTIPLY GOOD WORKS!
now get outta here. go make someone smile.
you'll be glad you did.