Yesterday I wrote about how personal happiness can be an ongoing negotiation, requiring you to problem-solve and troubleshoot various situations that will come up in order to stay current with your own happiness. I also believe that it is possible to examine one’s past to find clues for greater happiness, as long as you don’t stuck in the rabbit hole of dwelling on the past. These days, I often reflect on past experiences, doing what I can to gain clarity and have a happier present. I am training myself to…
Month: February 2019
Day 208: The Curriculum for Your Personal Happiness
A couple weeks ago I wrote how the journey to happiness is not a one-time event, how it can be a complicated, winding road of twists and turns and sometime failures that can change to sometime successes. And how it requires patience and self-forgiveness, as you continually refine your own mind and its ability to guide you to a happy life. Tonight I would like to write about how happiness is a continuous negotiation. Because it is not a one-time event, nosiree. New situations in life keep coming up, situations…
Day 207: Appreciate, don’t complain
There are so many things that are wonderful going on in your life. All you have to do is look. Often, people are taught that looking at the problems in their lives is the preferred way to be. Not because it feels good, not because it helps them, but because that’s what other people model to them. So they learn to do this. The problem with this behavior is that focusing on problems only tends to preserve them. Focusing on what makes you unsatisfied tends to amplify that experience. In…
Day 206: I finally learned how to eat
These days, my diet has waaay changed from what it used to be. Since last summer, I have a completely altered my way of eating: not only have I stuck to intermittent fasting (where I eat over an 8 hour period each day and fast for the next 16 hours), I have also severely reduced my reliance on breads, grains, and refined sugars. Here is what a typical day’s diet would have looked like prior to last August (times are guessed at to the best of my memory): 7am Wake…
Day 205: The Curtain (original rhyme)
I don’t feel like writing a whole lot tonight, so here is a rhyme I wrote a few years back that I’ve always liked: “The Curtain” You’re tall and chique, a cloth that reaches From the top of the room to the bottom in a heap Your cost ain’t cheap, your allure mysterious, So fascinating for the curious Inside the house, you define elegance, With bedtime relevance for love-struck residents Who get busy where you gracefully hang Witness the romance in the chamber they bang On the stage you’re the…
Day 204: I’d rather look for what’s right [with the world]
I spent a lot of my childhood feeling indignant, even upset and angry, about things I didn’t like “going on in the world.” I was told about “big problems” of the world, the injustices done to different people across the ages, etc. I worried about these things way too much for a young kid. By the time I was in college, I had spent eighteen years soaking in the notion that the American culture–of which I was a part–was single-handedly destroying the world. There was some benefit I received from…
Day 203: Onward into the Night!
It’s Friday night. 7:17pm reads my computer. In about 30 minutes, my wife and I are going to head over to the Comedy Spot, where I will be performing with the “You! the Musical” Comedy Troupe: we will be improvising an entire musical for a live audience. FUN! My dinner fresh in my tummy—asparagus, turkey, and cheese slices–I sit down to write this post. Thoughts of tonight’s rehearsal at the high school in Elk Grove are fresh on my mind–I was singing the lead number a few minutes ago as…
Day 202: Whole Hog (original rhyme)
When life is a lemon, it’s time to make juiceOtherwise the fruit gets old, and what’s the useIn old fruit that’s rotten and grey?Man, you shouldn’t let that shit decayYou hear what I say? It’s good fertilizerso time to get wiser, and always utilize yerraw material to create something expressive,the pain would be less if you just test this.So I suggest it, utilize your painscrutinize your strain before you euthanize your brain,the truth, it lies within, behind every bullshit lie and sin,don’t roll the die, begin to run your life…
Day 201: Adopt a Friendly Attitude Towards What Matters
My recent efforts at introspection have yielded many valuable insights that are shifting how I experience each day of my life. For one thing, I am catching a lot of the old thought patterns and programs “in the act,” either while they are busy tormenting me or (even more happily) before they get going 🙂 . This alone is helping me enormously, as it is making me very optimistic that I shall be able to shift my thinking onto thoughts that are more pleasing. Another thing I have been doing…
Day 200: Description Post #2
I am leaning back against the chair as I stare at the screen, watching each word emerge as I type. There is a light humming sound from the center room of our flat, from the heater that helps keep this place warm in cold months. There is a louder though intermittent sound of passing cars out on the street. Many of them are, no doubt, returning home for the evening. When I take a deep breath, the smell from the oil of cooking home fries is still in my nose.…