30 Days of Happiness, Day 10

I didn’t have to think too much about today’s challenge, which was to list and evaluate the things I do in my spare time to allow myself to focus on the ones that bring me joy.  No, it’s not because I have no spare time, although that sometimes feels true.  It’s because I recently had to revoke my own television privileges during the week.

Historically, I have not been a big watcher.  I adore watching football, but I find I watch a lot less even of that now that I have discovered biking and I have so many issues surrounding football culture (not enough to keep me from watching tomorrow’s Super Bowl…).  But there are a couple of channels out there that show cop show after cop show.  Dorothy Sayers, in one of her novels, has a character comment that crime fiction is the most moral kind of fiction:  the bad guys get caught.  I find this enormously soothing.  Suddenly it is 2 in the morning and I’m still on the couch.  Not okay.

Point being, I know which of my spare time things are fillers, psychic junk food.  I’m even learning to choose the organic, whole grain, free range psychic food instead.

30 Days of Happiness #9

I am not totally horrible at self-care.  I am not bragging.  I can’t afford to be horrible at it.  For one thing, I have kids.  Even though they are basically grown-ups, I am the Mama and need to be strong, stable, and healthy.  For another, a long period of neglecting self-care, among other things, led up to my worst depression period.  I have never been the same since.  I can’t go at 100 miles an hour indefinitely, doing All The Things at once.  It just doesn’t work.  I do what I have to do to keep running.  I admit that it kind of pisses me off that I require so much care to do part of what I used to be able to do, but it’s not like there’s an alternative.  Mostly I just get on with it.

Which brings me to the list:

Get enough sleep.

Get enough exercise.

Eat healthy food.

Get the occasional pedicure.

Clean house.

Play.

All of those things contribute to my wellbeing.

30 Days of Happiness #8, with a picture of a Roman mosaic floor

Given my overarching purpose, as determined yesterday, of seeking to bring everyone I know closer to his or her best self with love and gentleness, I have determined that this is what I want to accomplish this year:

Finish the certification I am working on and complete an additional certification.

Bring depth, growth, and/or healing to my relationships.

Stay awake to the daily and emerging opportunities to create growth.

Making this list was definitely an exercise for me.  I’m tired.  My brain muscles hurt.  Unfortunately, brain muscles seem to be like abdominals, best worked every day.

The exam for the certification I am working on is in about two weeks (YIKES!).  Because the universe has a sense of humor that tends to be based on timing, here I am making long term goals when I have stated repeatedly that no big decisions or complicated issues are going to be addressed between now and then.  Ha!  This certification has been the result of more than a year of work, so even though the actual result is happening soon, I think that completing it counts as a major accomplishment for the year.  However, I am always seeking the next bunch of lessons, so once the dust settles, I will pursue a weight loss or behavior modification specialization before the end of the year.

There’s not much to discuss about the second goal.  One of my motivations in pursuing this challenge is to bring a better self to my relationships.  Here I go.

The last goal might be sort of cheating, but I made it based on my experience.  Some of the best shifts in my life have come from out of nowhere.  Not once did I ever think, “Gee, I would be super happy if I could facilitate a service learning community,” or “I would love to be a personal trainer and bring strength to people so they can transform their lives.”  And yet both of those things happened and have been wonderful.  The point is that I found those opportunities by being awake, by looking around, by staying checked in.  I did it by accident twice; let’s see if I can make it a habit and something I bring to others.

30 days of happiness #7

I am about helping people grow.  It was an obvious part of my mission when my kids were young, and even now that they are mostly adults.  I have always been happiest when my work has allowed me to stretch the people around me, elicit their strengths, encourage them, and sometimes kick their behinds with love.

Growth is life.  It is also hard work.  I need all the help I can get in my own growth process and seek to emulate all the people who have enabled me.  My greatest heroes are the people who continually grow out of one phase and into another in a continual evolution toward their own best selves, using every lesson to attack each new challenge or embrace each new adventure.

Integrity, then, would be what I am trying to create in the world, both in the sense of honesty and in the sense of wholeness.  We tell ourselves and each other so many things that aren’t true because we are supposed to or because we are afraid of the alternatives or because we haven’t taken the time to evaluate and check what we are saying against reality.  This fractures us as individuals and as communities when we so badly need to be healed and whole.

Imagine a whole world full of people being their best selves!

So my vow, for now, is:  I will seek to bring everyone I know (including me!) closer to his or her best self with love and gentleness.

30 days of happiness #6

This challenge was, well, challenging.  I am, as I have said, blessed with excellent family and friends.  I don’t have trouble thanking them for their general awesomeness.  In fact, I like to make a point of it.

Sometimes my feelings don’t line up with how I think I should actually feel.  It is salutary to confront the facts, but not always pleasant.

30 Days of Happiness: Tell me a story...

Some of the stories I tell myself during the day don’t even happen.  I’m working on getting permits from my city for my studio.  My phone rang and Henry from the city was on the other end wanting to talk about my application.  In the split second between hearing that much and hearing what came next, I told an entire tale of disaster that went something like this:

Oh no.  Rejected already.  It’s probably because I screwed up something on the application.  Or maybe the neighbors are upset.  Or really it is just that I totally suck and now I’ve spent all this money on the process only to fail.  I should just go put my head under a rock and not come out.  What was I even thinking trying to do this?

Then he said, “I see you used the old application form.  Everything looks fine, but the fees went up.  You will need to pay an additional $3.19.  How would you like to handle it?”

I said I’d head down to the office and hand over the rest of the money.  T.R., who had a day off from school today, walked with me and we had a great time talking about the underlying philosophical questions in children’s toys and trying to decide what kind of buddy movie we’d like to see Vin Diesel and The Rock make together  (except that they’d need to be heroes somehow, I can totally see them as Jasper and Horace in 101 Dalmatians.).

Other incredibly friendly people helped me out when I got to the permit center.  Nothing bad happened.  Nothing.  I made a mistake and the world did not end.  I got to fix it with no fuss or mess.

Go figure.

30 days of happiness: 3 things to be grateful for

I have to begin with confession.  Gratitude is hard for me.  It is not that I am not grateful:  I am incredibly blessed with everything from a healthy body to great kids to cute shoes.  The problem lies with the depression.  When I can list 427 things I have to be grateful for and I am still depressed, I don’t feel cheered up; I feel defective.  Clearly, a person as blessed as I am should be filled with joy and constantly grateful for all 427 things.  Nope.  The “thinking distortion,” as they say, that I work against every day tells me I am worthless and hopeless and stupid.  My failure to be cheered up by what I am grateful for tends to reinforce the distortion rather than combat it.

However, I am willing to try again.  I have promised myself and said publicly that I am doing this challenge, so I will faithfully make my list.

Today I am grateful for:

Macaroni and cheese

Clean laundry

Naps

I went to the grocery store today and had a really pleasant conversation with a woman who has worked there as long as I’ve been shopping there.  She helped me find something in the continually rearranged merchandise, which led into a discussion of stick blenders and white bean soup.  I thanked her for her help.

Now that I have written down that last part, I am seeing something.  It is easy for me to be grateful to someone, but hard for me to be plain grateful.  I appear to conceptualize gratitude better as a relationship rather than a feeling.  So what I need to do, when I practice gratitude, is not just to make a list, but to thank people.

Thanks for this challenge, Toku.  I learned something.

30 days of happiness: In, Out, Repeat

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about breath.  It is an occupational hazard for a personal trainer and Pilates instructor.  I have even written about it here and here.  Thinking about breath was also included with my $19.95 plus shipping and handling double offer of depression with anxiety attacks, although I think it ended up costing a lot more and I didn’t really want it in the first place.

Today I rode my bike, which involves several of the different kinds of breath listed in the happiness challenge.  There is the rhythmic breath that takes on the cadence of my pedals, shifting slightly as the terrain shifts uphill or downhill.  Perhaps due to good old Joe (Pilates, that is), I have acquired the habit of breathing out forcefully and allowing my inhalation to be more gradual.

I also have to use a deliberately slow breath from time to time.  If my heart rate goes up too fast when I exercise, I can trigger my own panic attack.  Because panic attacks are slightly less fun than most things, I have learned to recognize the point at which I need to slow my breath to ensure I don’t go into full meltdown.  Full meltdown means I actually have to get off my bike, breathe for a long time, and then talk myself back on the bike, which is bad.  I did my longest ride in months today, so it was more difficult than usual and I needed to stay tuned in.

At the end of my ride, all of my muscles were screaming at me.  I used my breath to bring attention and love to each one, working my way up my body.  And then I counted breaths to fall asleep for a refreshing nap.

Sometimes I remind myself that breathing isn’t really that complicated.  In. Out. Repeat.

Six things for the second day of happiness

Today I began my happiness journal.  (It's really just my regular journal, but with an extra name.) My assignment is to list six things that I can or do do regularly to create happiness and then to discuss how and why I do or do not make space to enjoy them. 

The six things are:

1.     Ride my bike.

2.     Read.

3.     Swim.

4.     Ski.

5.     Listen to loud music.

6.     Eat good food.

Three of those things are physical activities.  The truth is I could have made the entire list out of various kinds of workouts.  I rely on exercise to make me happy in a healthy way.  The three I chose involve going outside, which always adds bonus points, although they have the inherent problems of dark and rain.  Skiing, obviously, is also seasonal.  Time isn’t really a problem; if I make the effort, I can arrange the time.  The hard part is getting going.  While I get energy from using my body, I need to have a minimum amount to start.  I have been working on getting more sleep to attack some of the underlying exhaustion.

Two of the other three things I try to build into my day by linking them with the drive to get T. from school.  I don’t enjoy driving, but it is much better when I can sing my head off and amuse other drivers with my car dancing.  I get to school early because I am always early and I read in the car.  Loud music during gym workouts is another bonus point situation.  And I often read more than usual on Thursday (the official day of getting nothing done).

Good food comes with several challenges, some of which I cope with by organization.  I plan weekly menus.  Since I cook dinner, I am (somewhat) in charge.  Brent is a carnivore and Syd is a vegetarian.  I work many evenings and so does Brent.  Syd has a busy schedule between work, workouts, and his fiancée.  T.R. may well decide to eat his weight in mac and cheese after school.  Therefore, I never know who will be eating dinner.  I have mostly surrendered my hope of eating together most nights.  Which means that the daily puzzle is how to cook a meal for an unknown number of people that all of them are willing to eat and that is reasonably healthy.  I get derailed by tiredness (“Call the pizza man…”), or discouragement (“What is this?  I’m going to make some eggs…”), or scheduling (“I forgot… I have to go to this thing tonight…”).  I keep at it because good food nourishes body and soul, but I wish it were more seamless.

30 Days

I signed up for a 30-dayhappiness challenge.  I’ll be posting about it for the next 30 days, both because sharing what I’m doing is part of the challenge and because I expect to learn things.  If you are fascinated, you, too, can do it. 

Today’s exercise is to set an intention/goal for the 30 days and to reflect on why or why not the goal is achievable.  My intention (goals smack too much of success/failure for my own wellbeing) is to acquire some useful tools.  I am a depressive.  I take my medications and do my workouts and I have my other favorite coping techniques, but I can still get walloped by the Depression Monster.  If I can increase the happiness in my life, I am more likely to keep the monster away.

I think this is doable.  I have dabbled in some of the areas of focus for the challenge, but will benefit from having a structure (must be Good Student!  Must always do all the homework!—sometimes my compulsions work to my advantage!).  Given the other stuff going on in my life right now, I may be biting off more than I can chew, but it is better to try, right?