The
year is almost at its halfway point; don’t ask me when this happened,
but it is a fact that July is quickly approaching. In the last months, I
have thought, mused, pondered, and meditated a lot about my word for
2015: Happiness. My goal for this year
was to work towards more happiness in our family by reducing stress,
easing up, and focusing more on each other.
Let me tell you about reducing stress in our family right now: it won’t happen. With a kid in 1st grade, another one in kindergarten and a feisty, adventurous, and cheeky baby, we’re
on our feet most of the day, struggling to keep at least a hint of order in our house.
But still, I refuse to give
up on my goal; instead, I have realized that I need to revise my
previous notion of happiness as a perpetual state. Instead, I seek
happiness in the moment. The moments I get to watch the kids play
peacefully (and more or less
quietly) together, the moments Lily is reading to all of us, when I see a field speckled with wild flowers, getting to watch Calvin dream
away in my arms; the moments hubby and I hug
each other for a minute, taking a time-out from the daily routine. All
those moments are happiness, like rays of sun shining through a screen,
making a difference every day.
I may still have hard days,
frustrating days, days I wished I could lock myself in my room and just
be by myself for a while, but I have realized that it’s the small things
that mean happiness in my life, not surfing on a perpetual wave of
bliss.
The realization that
happiness is generally an attitude to life, that I need to make the
conscious decision each day to make it a happy day, has taken a lot of
pressure off me, striving for my goal of happiness. There are days I
fail, that are stressful
and I simply do not manage to get into a positive mood in my haze of
sleep deprivation and general frustration, but I have also learned to
let it go. Not to stress myself about “making up” for those days, but
see every single day as a new, plain sheet, that
has all the potential to be filled with happiness. And then it’s up to
us how much happiness we paint on it.
Yes!!! I love this!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Jen! I've realized that my expectation of "happiness" is not only unrealistic but actually the source of much of my stress. Letting go of expectations has helped enjoying the Here and Now a lot more.
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