In the shower, where I do much of my philosophizing I was thinking about happiness… I consider myself to be, on the whole, a happy person, and yet I hesitate when someone asks me if I am. There is something inherently fleeting about happiness, something that makes me want to qualify my answer, hedge my bets.
I answer the question with a question. “Right this second?” I ask, and they look at me as if I’m trying to get away with something. “Yes,” I say, finally, with all the conviction I can muster. And I mean it. More or less…
So, anyway, there I was, in the shower wondering about happiness, mentally listing things that make me happy. Not big things like love, and family, and the steady paycheck I vaguely remember getting in my distant past. I mean smaller, everyday things. Everyday things without which I am less happy. Even unhappy. Here’s my list.
- Writing time. I have a lot of stuff on my plate right now. Much of it is only peripherally related to writing. I feel it every day, the disconnect… my sense of drift, of having been blown a bit off course.
- Sunshine. I didn’t realize how much I was missing the sun until it began to shine again. Today I pulled a chair near the balcony window and edited in the warm, spring sunshine that poured in from outside.
- Lists. I like the illusion of control.
- Texts and Twitter… Bite-size love.
- Yoga. Any exercise, really, but yoga especially. It grounds me, reminds me to breathe, gets me as close to quiet as I am capable of being.
There are probably more, but that’s as far as I got before my shower, like all good things, came to an end.
So what are the everyday things that tip your happy scale?