High on Happiness

Archive for May, 2010

A squiggle of purple flowers on the cart caught my eye.  Maybe it was the intensity of the color, or the energetic waves of the petals, I don’t know.  But all of a sudden I felt as if I were seeing the world through the eyes of Vincent Van Gogh.  It all seemed so passionate and alive.

“How many ways can you paint a flower?” I wondered.  “Or an insect, or a bird, or a baby, or a tree?”    Think of the countless variety of colors, of shapes and sizes even one species comes in.  This is no cookie-cutter world we live in.  It’s a veritable banquet of sensual delights.

Think of all the colors the human eye can see, the range of sounds our ears can hear, the vast array of textures and pressures we perceive, the fragrances, the tastes.  The countless variations astound the mind.  And still, what we sense is only one small slice of what’s there.  Whole worlds dance outside our senses’ capacity to perceive them.

I read once that when we pass onto the next dimension, we acquire additional senses and so perceive an even more complex and intricate world.  And as we move through eternity, we gradually acquire greater and greater capacities to experience the magnificence of it all.  Then, after billions and billions of years and a sojourn that wends its way through universe after universe, we’re finally large enough and strong and pure enough to see it all, and to see that it’s always new, always changing and never ever ends.  And so we erupt into songs of  joy that flow endlessly through all creation.

“Momma!  When can I come out and play?” the little aster called.  “All the other buds have opened.  I want to come out, too!”

The little bud was frustrated.  She felt the sun’s warmth on her outer petals and heard the oooo’s and ahhhh’s of the other buds as they opened to its light.  But here she was, still curled tight.

She wanted so much to be a full-fledged flower.  Every morning when the birds sang their dawn song, she woke expecting to find herself unfurled and free.

“You will open soon enough, my darling,” the mother said.  “Remember, time is wise and always does things in the right order.”

“But Momma, I’m tired of being a bud.  I want to know what it’s like to unfold and stretch my petals.”

“I know, dear,” crooned the mother.  “And a flower you will be.  A sweet one, full of nectar for the bees and dancing in the sun.  But right now, your job is to be a bud, the very best bud you can be.

“Do you feel that wiggling in your little petals?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the bud.  “It kind of tickles.”

“That’s a sign that you’re growing.  You’re itching to grow.  And do you feel your heart filling up with golden nectar?  You’re building up a store of treats to share with the world and to make seeds for the all tomorrows that will come.  Who you are right now is very, very important.  Pay attention to everything you feel.  Isn’t it filled with life?”

“You’re right!” the little bud giggled.  “It is!”

“And it’s just exactly the life that nature designed you to express,” said the mother.  “I know it can be difficult to wait for what comes next, but who you are right now is a miracle, my sweet one.  Be at peace, and I will tell you a story about what it’s like to be a grown up flower.  You can dream about that as you grow.  Dreaming about how you will be tomorrow is a fine way to spend time when you feel stuck with where you are.  Would you like to hear the story?”

The little bud relaxed and felt the life force moving within her and thought about being a miracle, and about being the best bud she could be.  “Yes, mother!” she whispered as she eased into the comfort of her curled petals.  “Tell me the story.”

“Once upon a time,” the mother began, “a sweet little bud was born, filled with all she needed to become a radiant wild aster . . .”

As luck would have it, my floor of the building was almost deserted today.  Meetings, both off-site and on, pulled almost everyone away.

Today, of course, was the day I decided to give out the Best Laugh award.  It was a game I play with myself where, after listening to laughter throughout the day, I would pick the best one over supper.

Interestingly – and almost as if they were summoned by my intention to find amusement in the day – the only two coworkers who stopped by my office came with the express purpose of telling me charming stories about cute situations that happened on their floors.

A third coworker sent me an email about an episode of an old TV game show where a one-liner evoked laughter so contagious that it took half the show just to calm the audience back down.   I chuckled,  imagining it.  I think I may have seen that show.

As I worked, I found myself recalling the laughs of people I have loved in my life.  My dad’s laugh was a treasure, and my sons’, too.  I could hear them in my mind. But did remembered laughter count for my game?  Hmmmm.  I wasn’t sure.

Until late in the afternoon, the only actual laugh I heard was a sort of horse-like snort.  And I wasn’t going to give that one an award if it was the only one I heard all day.

Finally, when the day warmed up enough, I opened my office window.  Along with the street sounds, a soft breeze carried in the laughter of children playing in a nearby yard.  It was as free and bright as the sunshine, and I sent them an imaginary blue ribbon right then and there.  Nothing that I would hear the rest of the day, I was sure, could surpass it.  Its sweetness and purity claimed the gentle victory and won the prize.

On my way home, I stopped to see how the creek looked after our two days of rain.  It was beautiful, or course, tumbling merrily over the rocks in a singing, bubbling cascade of foamy water.  Overhead, birds called from the trees and a squirrel chattered.  The breeze rustled through the newly opened leaves.  As I listened to the music of it all, it sounded like the laughter of springtime.  “You get a prize, too,” I whispered to it.  “Oh yes, you get a prize.”

Okay.  I’ve had it with Murphy.  Tomorrow I’m giving out a Best Laugh Award.  It’s the surest cure after ol’ Murph comes dragging his accursed “everything that can go wrong will go wrong” law across your day.

Nothing horrid happened, mind you.  Just a thousand small annoyances:  Misplaced keys, misplaced cat, misplaced papers, spilled coffee, clogged plumbing, slow traffic, a forgotten lunch, computer glitches, an incessantly ringing phone  while deadlines leered from the sidelines.

I have to admit it.  Old Murphy got my goat.  By late afternoon I was one frazzled grump.  (Even happy people have their off days.)

“How on earth am I going to break this mood?” I thought as I walked through cold rain toward the grocery store.  And just then, my eyes fell on the flats of petunias.  As if to answer my question, a voice in my head recited an e e cummings line:  “The earth,” it said, “laughs in flowers.”

“Aha!  That’s it!” I said to myself.  “I’ll show old Murphy a thing or two.  Tomorrow I’m giving out a Best Laugh Award.”  I set my intention right then and there, and immediately my gloom vanished.  I thanked the petunias by taking their picture and bought a hot supper to take home.

I started to wonder who would set the best laugh loose.  Diane?  Michael?  Bob?  A stranger?  Would I hear it in person, or on the radio?  At work, or at home?  Would it roll down the hall?  Sneak through the phone lines?  Come wafting through my open window?   Would it be a throaty chuckle, a silly tee-hee, a hearty guffaw?

The Best Laugh Award is one of my favorite variations of the Best-of-the-Day game.  You can look for anything you want—most beautiful thing, best idea, best smile, best overheard comment, best billboard, best display of the color red.  You just look for the best of your chosen category all day, and then, at day’s end, pick the winner.  It’s an exercise in keeping your attention focused.  And it yields some surprising results.

So move aside Murphy.  Your law’s got nothing on me.  One display of petunias wiped out your entire bag of tricks.  The best laugh today is the one I got on you!

When I checked my email this morning, I discovered that the topic for one of the ezines I get was “synchronicity.”  It’s one of my favorite subjects, evoking such fascinating proofs of the connections between our minds and the world outside.

I marked it for later reading and then headed off to work, thinking on my drive about the article I’m writing for Positive-Living-Now about how to notice more of the positive experiences in your life.  I had a feeling that there was one more piece I needed to complete a section of it, but I just couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

I let it go to pay attention to the traffic as I approached a congested construction area, thinking how miserable it must be to have to work outside in the mud and the steadily falling rain.  But the area seemed devoid of workers.  “Maybe they don’t work when it rains,” I thought to myself.

Then, just as I approached the end of the stretch, I saw a worker heading toward me.  Dressed in bright orange rain gear and a hard hat, he was wearing an equally bright smile and walking as if his favorite tunes were playing in his head.  I burst into a smile, too, and just then he looked in my direction and we nodded good morning to each other as if we were the only two people awake on the planet.  I collected the moment for my “noticing” basket.

The day passed, filled with its usual complements of laughter and sighs.  And I drove home with a plan to take photos of my newly budding lilacs in the rain.  When I processed the pictures, I was thrilled at the results.  How joyful the fragrant buds seemed, awash in the sparkling droplets.  Down to the smallest detail, everything gets what it needs.

After supper, I turned again to my email, and there, in another newsletter, was exactly the bit of information I needed for my article.  “Synchronicity,” I thought, laughing.  The little miracles of life are everywhere.  And whether we recognize it or it, we all get exactly what we need.

I used to work in an office with a man who brightened the whole place every time he walked in the door.  When anybody asked, “Jim, how are you today?”  He would reply with a big, booming, “Beautiful!”  And no matter what was going on, if you were within earshot of him, you couldn’t help but smile.

Happiness, you know, is contagious.  Hang out with happy people and your joy meter rises.  Your brain just laps the stuff up.

So as you head out the door, or into the next room, put your happy walk on.  Get your groove goin’.  Smile at folks as if you and they are sharing some really cool secret.  Whistle.  Hum.  Make the day a party.  Pass out pats on the back.  Say “Gosh, you look great today!”  And when anybody asks you how you are, say “Beautiful!” Say “Fantastic!” Say “Outstanding!  Say “Phenomenal!”  (Because, of course, you are.)

You are one amazing human being, a one-of-a-kind treasure, a star, living in a sea of stars.  So go rock it!  Spread some joy.  See what happens.

You’re gonna love it.

When I saw the tiny maple leaves, just emerged from the tip of the branch, I thought about watching one of those time lapse movies.  You know, the ones where you see a whole day sweep by from sunset to dusk in a mere minute or two.

I imagined a little maple seed, the kind that twirl to the ground like helicopters, settling into the soil, sprouting, enduring a winter, coming back taller and stronger each spring until today, it stood before me, a proud sapling, with its endless unfolding of new leaves.  Soon it would produce helicopter seeds of its own, and the story would go on and on.

It reminded me of an exercise I learned once where you travel back through the history of something to appreciate all that contributed to its presence in your life.  If you were eating an apple, for instance, you could trace it back to the store where you bought it and think about all the people who were involved in operating the store.  Someone ordered it; someone sold it; someone unpacked it from its crate and set it out for display.

Before that, it traveled on a truck that came from a distributor who bought it from an orchard.  The truck had a driver, who worked for a company, and it traveled over roads that were imagined and engineered and built.

The apple was one of dozens that came from a tree that thrived in the orchard, soaking in a summer’s sun and rain.  And before that it was a blossom that grew on a tree that produced a seed.  Someone bought the seedling it produced and placed it in the soil and nurtured it. Someone picked it and placed it in the crate that was loaded onto the truck.

And now it was in your hand, and you would bite it and think what a miracle it was and how crisp and juicy and sweet its flesh.  And it would nurture you.  You were the whole reason it came to be.  You and the owner and workers in the orchard, and in the grocery store and the builders of crates and trucks.  And the story goes on and on.

It’s a wonderful exercise.  It gives you a unique perspective.  It broadens your sense of the connectedness of things and leads you to appreciate the wonder of life’s endless unfolding.  And in the end, it leads you to the big questions:  How did it all come to be?  Where did it come from?  Why am I, a tiny life form on a small speck of planet in the midst of a giant and dazzling universe, capable of wondering why?

Our brains are wired, science shows, to pay more attention to the bad than to the good, even though our good times far outweigh the lesser ones.  Take a sheet of white paper, place a dot on it, and it’s the dot that you see and remember.  “We’re like Teflon for the good experiences,” one researcher put it, “and Velcro for the bad.”

You can easily see that in your own life.  Looking back over the day, you can name the things that went wrong much more readily than the things that went right—even when your feelings tell you that, overall, you had a pleasant day.

One way to build your happiness quotient is by taking time to anchor the positive moments in your mind.  When a phone call brings good news, take a few seconds to think about why it made you feel happy.  When you read something that inspires or excites you, note the feeling and what was good about it.

Positive feelings last longer when you don’t over-analyze them, though.  So a quick nod of your attention in their direction is all you need.  A simple label will do:  “That was really thoughtful.  I’m touched,” or “How exciting, or beautiful, or encouraging.”

When you consciously recognize the gifts of the day, they become more memorable.  They transform into little jewels of light that you can savor at day’s end, or fodder for pleasant stories to share over dinner.  Noticing the good dots your day with highlights and keeps it from becoming merely a mildly pleasant blur.

Think of it as collecting sparkles.  Give it a try.

“An optimist is the human personification of spring.” ~Susan J. Bissonette

Spring is like the Energizer bunny:  It just keeps going, and going, and going.  Even this week’s cold spell and storms haven’t stopped it.  The flowers keep coming, regardless, and my winter-starved eyes are feasting in their unfolding colors.

Susan Bissonette was right on target in linking optimism and spring.  Both the season and the human trait sing of resilience and renewal.  Despite setbacks, they’re undaunted.  They weather the storms.  They’re filled with purpose.  They trust in the life force that pushes its vision into realization through their willingness to keep on keeping on.

Believing there’s a summer ahead and the potential for a bountiful harvest, you put setbacks in perspective.  You may be damaged and bruised, but something beautiful lies ahead, and you know it in the depths of your being, even when you can’t quite see exactly how it will work out.

I watched the flowers in the cold rain.  They curled inward and surrendered to its force.  After it passed and the sun’s rays once again caressed them, they opened and bathed themselves in its light.  And even though their petals were weakened and their stems bent, they pushed into the light and, basking in its comfort and power, were made whole and beautiful again.

Spring always follows winter.  Dawn always follows night.  When life brings its setbacks and storms, remember that.  Be like a flower in the rain.  Be an optimist.  Keep the faith.

The front desk called.  “Would you please unlock the playground?” Doris asked.  “The landscapers are here.”  I always love getting that call.  It gives me a chance to escape into the outdoors for a few minutes to breathe fresh air and hear the birds.

I had spotted the shrubbery behind the locked gate as I walked past it when I arrived for the day.  A row of waist-high bushes were sporting hundreds of globes of white blossoms that looked like fat popcorn balls.

I grabbed my camera from my purse as I headed out the door.  This was a chance to get my daily photo; it would be raining by the time I left for the day.

As I approached the bushes I saw that the blooms were a miniature hydrangea of some sort.  My eyes quickly swept across the panorama, waiting for just the right groupings of flowers and leaves to call me.  And when they did, I focused in close.

Suddenly I was engulfed in visions of delicate beauty and subtle hues.  “Just look at these! Look at these!” I said to myself as I composed my shots.  Each globe was actually a small bouquet, fit for the hand of a bride.  “How lovely!”

As much as I enjoy framing landscapes in my camera’s viewfinder, the close-in views move me the most.  Seeing the artistry in the smallest details, the harmony and balance and grace of the lines, the delicacy of petals, awes me.  Deep in the woods, or here, in a locked playground, where no one may ever see them or notice, are these masterpieces of living art.

They unfold in beauty regardless, following the dictates of grand cosmic laws that, in their perfection, render beauty in everything they bring into being.  Whether we see or notice it or not.

I quickly snap half a dozen shots and turn away.  My duties call.  But I am renewed now.  And when I walk into the clinic’s lobby all the faces I see are touching and beautiful.