Do Happy: Undecide
“Open minds lead to open doors.” ~Unknown
We start forming opinions at an early age, and continue all through life.
We decide what we think is right and wrong, what’s good and what’s bad. Not just on a larger scale (our religion, politics, ethics) but also in every-day interactions.
How people should act. What people should think in certain situations. What it’s OK to feel and express, and when it’s smart or polite to do so.
We develop ideas about how the world should be to support our beliefs and views–things we learned from our environment and experiences–and inevitably feel a sense of internal conflict when a person or situation doesn’t fall in line.
They won’t always. In fact, they won’t more often than they will.
Why You Should Prosper Even Though There’s Suffering in the World
by Sonia Derian
I write a newsletter every week and last month, a subscriber emailed me with a question I thought was worth exploring.
“… I guess what I’m getting at is if everyone had a choice, treating sewage would be the last thing one would want to do. Isn’t it? Well yes I’m making that judgment. If everyone was Wayne Dyer or that money guru lady Suze Orman, we’d all be reaching fantasy levels of achievement. That is what they seem to be proposing is possible.
But someone still has to take out the trash. If we’re all living big then who’s taking care of the landfills? I guess we could all be having wonderfully luxurious lives but chip in on the dirty stuff sometimes? Like volunteer, or Adopt-A-Highway kind of stuff. Then a boy in Iraq gets his arms and legs blown off and I’m supposed to be like “Yahoo, I’m living big???”….. uh? This is my ‘resistance; isn’t it?… Anyway, there is a topic here. Anything to help me feel better about living big while others suffer…”
It’s a big question: If there are others suffering in the world, what right do I have to think about myself or my lofty goals? What right do I have to consider more for myself when there are others who can’t even feed themselves, literally or figuratively?
50 Peaceful Things
by Lori Deschene
“Peace is not something you wish for. It’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.” ~Robert Fulghum
Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time visiting 1000 Awesome Things, a blog devoted to the many simple pleasures in life. Some of them remind me of being a kid, like this one about celebrities on Sesame Street. Others remind of me I’m stronger than I think, like this one about getting through difficult situations.
With that in mind, you can imagine how excited I am to receive a copy of Neil’s upcoming book, aptly named The Book of Awesome. I’m even more excited that I’ll be able to give away two autographed copies when I write my review. (Coming soon!)
In the meantime, as a way to pay tribute to this awesome book and my awesome new friend, I’ve decided to create my own awesome list, tinybuddha style.
Here are 50 peaceful things to help you be mindful and happy throughout the day:
1. Laying in bed for a few minutes in the morning before hopping into your day. There’s no reason to rush.
2. Eating breakfast slowly, at a table, instead of grabbing something on the go.
3. Listening to your favorite music on the way to work, and remembering when you first heard it. Where you were, who you were with, how you felt.
4. Hugging someone you know long enough to make it meaningful.
5. Appreciating something you take for granted, like your feet for taking you where you need to go.
Do Happy: Stop Hoping
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.” ~Samuel Johnson
You’ll find lots of inspiring quotes and posts that suggest you hold onto hope against all odds, find hope in the darkest of moments, and generally push through difficult times with your eye on a light down the road.
This isn’t one of those posts.
Sometimes hope is a beautiful thing. It can motivate, empower and inspire you when you’re tempted to give up. But other times it just keeps you stuck, albeit with a smile on your face.
When you push through today for a better tomorrow without doing anything to create that new possibility your hope creates the illusion of change to come.
When you hold onto the past, hoping to revive a relationship, situation, or time that’s come and gone your hope precludes even better possibilities in the present.
When you hope you’ll someday know happiness—when you get the right relationship, the right job, the right adventure—your hope allows you to avoid reality. And makes it unlikely you’ll ever know happiness since hope for something else is the only way you know to experience it.
One Simple Way to Make a Big Difference in Someone’s Life
by Therese Ember
“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.” ~Samuel Johnson
Just after my mother’s colon cancer surgery, my father was laid off from work.
I was 16 years old and felt silently helpless and terrified. My Mom had been attending church but, on this certain day, she didn’t feel well enough to attend. After this particular church service, an exceedingly thin, frail, elderly woman approached me. She requested if I would please accompany her on an errand.
I felt too afraid of being disrespectful of the elderly, so shyly I sat next to her in her car as she drove to a grocery store. Her name was Georgie.
I began pushing Georgie’s grocery cart down the first aisle. It was then that she paused, pointed to an item, and asked, “Do you have this in your house?”
I started to cry, realizing the true purpose of her “errand.”
10 Happiness Tips for People Who Have Been Hurt
by Lori Deschene
“As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot be free of it.” ~Eckhart Tolle
Maybe someone hurt you physically or emotionally. Maybe you’ve survived something else traumatic–a natural disaster, a fire, an armed robbery. Or maybe you’ve just come out of a trying situation, and though you know you’ll eventually recover, you still feel pain that seems unbearable.
Whatever the case may be, you’ve been scarred, and you carry it with you through many of your days.
Most of us can relate on some level to that feeling. Even people who excel at taking personal responsibility have at least one story of having been hurt. Though some of us have endured more serious situations, you really can’t quantify or compare emotional pain.
To a teenager who just had her heart broken, the pain really seems like the end of the world. In fact, Livestrong estimates that every 100 minutes, a teenager commits suicide–and that the number of suicides in high-income families is the same as in poor families. Presumably, not all of those teens have suffered incomprehensible tragedies. What they have in common is pain, born from different adversities and circumstances.
When you’re hurting some people might tell you to “Suck it up and deal” as if that’s a valid solution. They may say “It’s all in your head” and assume that reasons away the pain. But none of that will help you heal and find happiness from moment to moment.
Like everyone, I’ve been hurt–in both profound and trivial ways. I’ve dealt with it using the following ideas:
40 Ways to Use Time Wisely
by Belinda Munoz
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” ~Annie Dillard
Time. It is arguably our most valuable commodity.
Unlike treasured gems, precious metals and any other prized possessions, time can’t be hoarded, collected, earned, or bought with hard work, money, dignity or our soul. It slips away whether or not we choose to pack meaning into it. Use it or lose it, so goes the saying.
Though we all know how limited our lives are in the time-space continuum, we sometimes act like we don’t know the value of time. We use words like spend, kill or waste when we speak of how we while away the finite number of hours in each day.
Time management systems abound and still, we flounder and falter at making the most of every sunrise. We plan for the future and neglect to cherish the present. We’d rather look back wistfully even though the future is full of hope.
And yet, for many of us, it seems there are not enough hours in a day. We cram all that goes with living into twenty-four hours of ticking, bargaining with Father Time, naively expecting him to budge to our willful and resolute intentions to produce more, accomplish more, be more.
We paddle in paradox, limbs flailing, trading in the quality of our lives while doggedly pursuing an idealized quality of life.
Time. Like all the treasures in the world, we can’t take it with us when we reach our final stop. Some among us may never be willing to embrace happiness in and with the time that we do have.
For the rest of us, here are ways to improve our relationship with time. (Some things may appear to be contradictory. This is a testament to the complex nature of our relationship with time.):
Do Happy: Compare Yourself to Other People Well
“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.” ~Lao Tzu
Conventional wisdom suggests if you want to be happy you shouldn’t compare yourself to other people. Conventional wisdom isn’t always realistic.
Try as you may to completely stop making comparisons, you’ll likely come back to the instinct at least on occasion.
Discontent is part of the human condition—the nagging sense that something’s missing, even when you seem to have it all. We’re constantly evolving, growing, and looking for new ways to expand our impact on the world. New ways to reach and stretch our potential.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you see the pursuit as constant gain, instead of the cause as constant lack. And it’s equally harmless to compare yourself to others if it allows you to learn from people you admire.
If you compare yourself to your boss, and it motivates you to work smarter, that comparison improved your life for the better.
If you compare yourself to someone your age who started a non-profit, and it inspires you to volunteer, that comparison made a difference in not just your life, but others’, too.
It’s when the comparison game gets you down on yourself that you need to be cautious.
7 Creative Ways to Turn Everyday Situations into Opportunities
by Lori Deschene
“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” -Milton Berle
The people who are the most successful in life are the ones who create their own opportunities. Since I’m a work-from-home freelance writer who prefers beadworking to networking, I have to be ultra creative.
I’ve identified 7 simple ways to find opportunities in everyday situations. Here’s what I got:
1. Wear Your Resume While Running Errands
Last year I read an article about a woman named Kelly Kinney who printed her resume on a T-shirt. What a brilliant idea! I always notice words on shirts; I’ve even been known to ask strangers to hold still so I can get a better look (far less awkward when the wearer is a man.)
The Design Town offers a nice line of resume shirts, opportunistically priced at $90 each. If your money tree hasn’t sprouted leaves yet, like mine, you may prefer going through resumeshirts.com.
Do Happy: Get Luckier
“Care and diligence bring luck.” ~Proverb
When things aren’t going well for you it’s easy to blame it on bad luck. To assume other people who are doing better had more help and advantages.
Nothing could be less empowering. This line of thinking just confirms that the world is unfair and you have limited control.
While both those things are true on some level—life isn’t fair, and in many ways, we’re not in control—happy people take responsibility and create their own luck; while their unhappy counterparts sit around blaming misfortune, feeling bitter that other people appear to get all the breaks.
Happy people focus on ways to improve their situation, put in the work, and allow themselves to enjoy minor victories.
You could be one of those people.
According to Richard Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life, anyone can create their own luck. He argues that our thinking defines far more of our reality than chance. He notes that lucky people:
