High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Engagement’

Look as far and as fast as you want; something is always there.  No space has been neglected.  Nothing is absent.  The Wide Mind has covered it all.

All dreams?  All imaginings?  All possibilities?

Yes.  And then some.  It’s the nature of its play.

But it leaves for you the engagement, the discovering, the experiencing and proving, the putting together of things in never before made real combinations.   It’s no fun, after all, to play all alone.

The showers began in the wee hours and continued throughout the day.  Coming as they did on a Saturday, no doubt they caused some consternation.  It’s the season, after all, for weddings and picnics in the park.  But for me, it was a day of raining joy.

With the perfect excuse to postpone my errands, I brewed a pot of tea and parked myself at my computer to write.  I’m working hard on my imminent launch of Positive-Living-Now, a sister website for High on Happiness, where you’ll find a growing wealth of resources for building more meaning, joy and satisfaction into your own life.   (You can sign up right now to be in on the launch.  Check it out!)

As much as I appreciate and enjoy my day job, it does gobble up my energy and time.  To have an entire day to spend on my key projects is bliss.  So today I reveled in my writing and my graphic arts.

To have meaningful personal goals makes of your life a joyous journey.  They provide such a sense of direction and purpose.  They illuminate your path. They call you forward and stretch you to learn in their service.

When you have meaningful goals, they pull you to tap your best strengths, to hone your abilities, to risk leaps you wouldn’t otherwise have dared.  They keep you going when you’re weary and discouraged.  They tantalize and torment you with problems to solve, and so you’re never bored.

You find yourself getting lost in them, losing all sense of time because you’re so engaged.  And when at last you set them aside for the day, the satisfaction washes over you as if it’s been raining joy.

Down the road, we’ll talk about how to find a genuinely meaningful goal at Positive-Living Now.   For now, ask yourself what you really love doing, what you would most want to create in your life—even if you have no idea how you would find the time or the means for doing it.  Then just lightly play with your dream from time to time.  See where it leads you.  See what possibilities float into your awareness, what options appear that could move you toward a clearer vision of the shape it could take, the steps you might make in its direction.  It all begins, after all, with a dream.

Grab one.  Nurture it a little.  Watch how it grows, and how it grows you.  See if you don’t wake up one morning watching joy clouds moving your way.

No, not that kind.  I mean the “absorbed” kind, where something interests you so much that you forget everything except what you’re doing.  You forget about yourself, you forget about time.  All that exists is the activity you’re involved with, because you’re fully involved.

“Engagement” is a word I run across a lot as I dig into the academic research about happiness.  It turns out that it’s one of the biggies for producing satisfaction in a person’s life.  I looked the word up in the dictionary the other day and was amused to find that it means both “pledged to be married,” and  “entered into conflict with”—as in engaging the enemy.

But the more I thought about it, the more fitting the word seemed for the process that the happiness researchers are talking about.   When they use the term “engaged,” they’re not talking about a passive activity, like watching TV, or daydreaming—however pleasant those activities may sometimes be.  They’re talking about someone tackling an activity that’s both attractive and challenging, about something that requires your focused attention because doing it well requires exercising your skills.  In other words, you marry yourself to it and sometimes fight with it all at the same time. It could be anything from creating a scrapbook to running a race, or solving a math problem, or baking the perfect chocolate cake.

Usually, we become engaged in an activity when it’s in service of a goal that’s meaningful for us.  We want to do the activity well because it matters to us.  For instance, I happen to be a photography enthusiast.  I’ve looked at the world through a camera’s lens since I was a little kid.  And I take pictures for the joy it gives me.  But recently, I added a challenge to the activity.  I decided I would post one picture online every day.   Now, every day when  I’m out shooting, finding and creating a really good photo is all that matters to me. I’m wholly oblivious to anything else, and time simply seems not to exist.  Two hours can fly past without my noticing.

The key outcome of engagement is a wonderful sense of satisfaction when you complete whatever it is you were doing.  You don’t notice that you’re happy while you’re doing it, because you’re completely lost in the doing.  But afterwards, you know the doing felt grand.

Knowing about engagement has let me notice when I exercise it, and to savor more fully its joy.  And now you know about it, too.  So go out there and get engaged.

Want to know one of the secrets of high achievers?  They have  clear pictures inside themselves of how it will feel when they’re performing at their best, when they’re playing at the top of their games.

Whether you’re a butcher or baker or candlestick maker, there’s a feeling you get when you’re doing everything right.   You guide the knife perfectly along the lines of muscle, you coax just the right resiliency from the dough beneath your hands, you blend the waxes so they flow with a beautiful consistency.  And in that moment, you experience such clarity and ease that you want to do it again and again, every time you set about your work.

The feeling is a special kind of happiness, one of engagement and flow.  And those who experience it say it’s so fine that it’s worth all the work that goes into creating it.  The hours of learning, the days of practice are nothing compared to the feelings of satisfaction and joy that comes from exercising mastery.

High achievers in all walks of life—athletes, artists, business leaders, surgeons—all describe the sense of wholeness and energetic harmony they feel, the sense of smooth effortlessness, when they were in full resonance with their work.  And what’s more, they say it’s the memory of this feeling that motivates them to keep refining their skills, to pull themselves up again when they hit a dry spell.   They want to feel it every day, to have it be the pivot around which their days revolve.

The key is to keep at what you’re learning until you reach the moment when you’re lost in the utter and complete harmony of doing it well, of being the best you can be at it.  Whatever you’re working toward, take time to sink into your expectation of how it will feel once you have attained prowess, mastery of your skill.  Allow yourself to feel it in your body, to experience the richness of it fully in your imagination, to save the depth of happiness and freedom that it offers your spirit.

The day will come, if you keep on keeping on, if you persevere through the hours of preparation and practice, when the feeling is more than a dream.  And knowing inside yourself how it will feel when you get there is one of the surest ways to keep yourself keeping on.