The BOLD (Nurture Happiness)
Your feeds are full of New Year’s energy, I’m sure. “Jump on this one moment, the only one in which new starts are possible, and make massive plans to conquer space and time itself.” No pressure.
My feed is bubbling with the stuff. I love this time of the year. I really do. This year, though, I’m enjoying a new thought amidst my old rituals and recurring ideas.
I’m exploring the notion that is not hunger but appetite that moves us to greater heights. I’m deploying happiness, and more specifically contentment, as my secret ingredient this year.
The Whisper (Unlock New Features)
If you notice where you are, if you dare to celebrate, you’ll stop trying. Contentment and drive cannot cohabitate. That’s what my dear Grandmother believed. Unfortunately, she was wrong.
I was an adult before I discovered that she only bragged about each of her grandchildren to the other grandchildren. Consequently, we never knew how proud she was of us and we tended to resent each other a bit. The concept totally backfired. It softens the blow a bit to know that she did it out of love. Born at the turn of the last century, she had married 3 years before the Depression crashed down on everyone. Her eldest son served in World War II. Her family history included untimely deaths, unexpected poverty, and even a shipwreck. She is to be forgiven if her perspective was a little…stern.
If we cultivate happiness, we are actually much more likely to do well. This flies in the face of the way we’ve been trained. It belies popular theories of education, feedback, development, management, and even politics. However, it is a sound idea. For 2023, nurturing happiness could be the thing that really ingnites our lives. I get that it might feel like starting a fire in a windstorm. Still, fire good–needless self-sacrifice bad.
So, as I said, it’s New Year’s Energy Time.
First, here’s what I love: The looking back with fondness and chagrin.
The heady thoughts of what could be.
And the planning–the lists and words and charts and journals and workbooks and spreadsheets to capture what could be and to force it through the tiny holes of what is to try to form new shapes like some kind of twisted playdough contraption of future forecasting.
I’m doing all that. AND…
This year, what I’m enjoying is a good dose of contentment. I really lean into my accomplishments from last year. I hygge in my living room with a hot cup of tea and enjoy the solace of home. I embrace the wild, wooliness of the people in my life (family, friends, famous people who feel like both but really are neither despite their PR team’s various and creative attempts to convince me otherwise). I say a little prayer of thanks over the sink, the desk, the washing machine–all the places where care unfolds for me and mine.
I’m deploying happiness.
It’s easy to fall prey to anxiety. I choose to eradicate worry since it’s never done anything for me and has, in fact, worked against me.
It’s easy to listen to the world and run a calculation that will always end with me in the red–not good enough, smart enough, active enough, ahead enough, rich enough, powerful enough. Enough, enough. I choose to avoid the offered (and often dictated) pre-printed measuring sticks to assess my life and, rather, to make my own colorful marks on my (metaphorical) wall.
It’s easy to think that if I let up on the gas and settle into contentment, I will settle. How can ease and drive be engineered into the same engine? I choose to fuel my drive with the delicious notion that I can grow and change and achieve not because I have to but because I get to.
So, revel in the wonder and the moment of new beginnings, renewed inspiration, and refreshed commitments. And enjoy what you’ve already delivered with joy-filled awe.
Contentment is not the opposite of ambition–it is the axle grease that keeps it spinning, the jet fuel that powers its intensity, and the whole point, after all.
When we are hungry, we become blind to nuance as we flail and scramble driven by overwhelming need. When we have an appetite, we take time to savor, seek, and cultivate. Contentment is the necessary element that moves us from a hunger that only sees need to a deep appetite for what will be healthier for us in the long term and more fun in the moment.
I wish you deep contentment and the adventures that it facilitates.
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