Do you remember me? I know it's been an age since we last spoke, but alas, I've returned from the dead!
You may be wondering what's brought me back here, what do I have to discuss, since I've been MIA for...well, longer than I care to admit.
You, dear reader. You are what has brought me back.
I am here today to help you solve a problem, a problem I know you have, no matter who you are...are you ready? Prepare to be amazed...
I am going to help you learn how to be happy! So, here's the thing, life goes all topsy turvy, and we get thrown around the back of the bus. But, whether we like it or not, we always wind up back in the seat, and life continues on.
As you may remember, I have a past riddled with depression, and a few other lovely tricks that I still haven't found the courage to discuss here. But! I am here, I am trying, I am being open and honest, despite my fingers sometimes pausing over the keys, debating how far to spread my heart open.
So, I would like to take some time today to help you find happiness-well, joy, technically, if we're going for precision here. So, I recently watched a TED talk on where joy hides, and how to find it, by the lovely Ingrid Fetell Lee. And I can say that I learned a lot! If you want to watch the complete video, which I highly recommend, and it's only 14 minutes, please, click here.
But, if you don't have the time to watch it, allow me to summarize! To begin with, what is joy? Well, per Ms. Fetell Lee, "When psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion -- one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down."
And she did some digging, trying to figure out, what exactly made us feel joyful, and she began to notice patterns. "After a few months of this, I noticed that there were certain things that started to come up again and again and again. They were things like cherry blossoms and bubbles...swimming pools and tree houses...hot air balloons and googly eyes -- and ice cream cones, especially the ones with sprinkles. These things seemed to cut across lines of age and gender and ethnicity."
So, be honest, tell me, do these images make you smile, maybe even just on the inside? Do you feel a little lighter? Maybe slightly more...joyful?
I don't know about you, but I certainly feel lighter, more joyful!
So, what is the common denominator? Well, again, per Ms. Fetell Lee, it's "round things...pops of bright color...symmetrical shapes...a sense of abundance and multiplicity...a feeling of lightness or elevation."
She also said that color and abundance are part of our basic evolution from early caveman to present day human. Color is a sign of life. And abundance means survival. If you think about it, early cavemen would have been looking for bright fruits and berries to eat, and they'd be looking for a bunch of them. One berry isn't going to get anyone very far, but a whole grove of berries, now we're talking. And if that berry bush has no bright berries on it, it's just brown twigs and green leaves...well there's not much eating going to be happening.
And as far as the round objects go, apparently angular objects stimulate our amygdala, which is associated, in part, with fear and anxiety. Mostly likely because angles would be associated with things that could hurt our early caveman ancestor, but curves and round objects, well, those aren't scary at all. When's the last time you hurt yourself on something round...don't answer that if you're a klutz like me-I can hurt myself on anything it seems.
But suffice it to say, we find joy all around us, we just have to know what to look for. And that's my challenge to myself, and to you, in order to truly find joy and eventually happiness. Get out there, in this big, bad, real world of ours, and find those small joys. And don't worry if they make you seem childish or immature, because the joke is really on whoever is picking on you for liking those things. We all look up when we see a rainbow or fireworks.
Let yourself find joy in the small moments, the every day moments where joy can come to you, if you know what to look for. We don't need rainbows and fireworks every day. Not if we can find similar joy in seeing a cherry blossom tree in bloom, or a kid blowing bubbles in a park, etc, etc.
Life doesn't have to be joyful all the time, but there are hidden facets of joy all around you, each and every day. Learn to see them, learn to actually see things that you normally gloss right over. Let life show you, with childlike wonder, how beautiful, how happy, how joyful, things can be.
And it might not be enough to completely transform your day, this little post on happiness, but it might be enough to at least lighten your heart for a few minutes...and even if that's all it does, I'll consider that a job well done. There's a quote that I had stuck to my mirror when I was in the thick of my depression: and if today, all you did was hold yourself together, I'm proud of you.
So whatever this post means to you, however you can interpret that, I hope you do your best. I had an amazing therapist at one say to me, "Have a reasonable day."
And that sounded weird to me at first, and I thought, how weird, have a reasonable day...who says that? But the more I thought about, the more genius it became. Because, maybe, just maybe, I was having a bad day. She wasn't going to tell me to have a good day, because that can be a monumental task when you're dealing with major depression. But she was telling me, do the best you can. Be reasonable with yourself, and your expectations.
So, no matter where you are today: great, good, okay, bad, terrible...take this post and hold it in your heart for a moment. Really let it sink in. There is joy all around you, you just have to know what to look for. And it doesn't have to be huge moments that transform into a happy person, on the contrary, it's supposed to be small. Remember, joy is an "intense, momentary experience of positive emotion". It doesn't have to transform your life, it just has to transform your heart for a brief moment. It should give you a reprieve, letting you breathe easier for a moment, letting your soul ease for a moment.
So, how do I propose you find happiness? Well, I'd like to end with one final quote from the talk:
"Each moment of joy is small, but over time, they add up to more than the sum of their parts. And so maybe instead of chasing after happiness, what we should be doing is embracing joy and finding ways to put ourselves in the path of it more often. Deep within us, we all have this impulse to seek out joy in our surroundings. And we have it for a reason. Joy isn't some superfluous extra. It's directly connected to our fundamental instinct for survival. On the most basic level, the drive toward joy is the drive toward life."
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