High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘serenity’

A blanket of soft clouds covered the day, muting its colors and sounds.  Now and then the sky sprinkled little showers of rain that stirred the first scents of autumn.   I felt the quiet stirrings of the season’s change within myself, its call to contemplation.

The happiness of contemplation that autumn brings wafts into awareness with a special note of its own.  Its song is a nostalgic one, of saying farewell to one season of our lives and welcoming in a new one.  It’s a kind of peaceful yearning to let pieces float into place, to harvest the abundance of seeds sown and cultivated in the season that went before.

It’s a pulling inward, a settling.  It’s a time for taking stock of where we are after all our activities, for savoring how they enlarged and enriched us.  It lets us look, too, at the places where we can do better in the months ahead, where we can alter our outlooks, our relationships, our ways of being in the world that will bring us greater satisfaction and joy.

One of the qualities of the happiness of contemplation is its tendency to open us to our intuition, to the voice of inner guidance.  It whispers of new possibilities, of new ways to express and develop our strengths and talents as we step into the season ahead.  It hints of capabilities we can explore and nudges us to probe more deeply into the potentials within us, just waiting to be recognized and claimed.

When the next quiet hour appears in your life, cozy yourself somewhere private and indulge in some reverie of your own.  Let your thoughts drift over all the past season has added to you, the wisdom it’s brought, the memories you created.  Take some time to lose yourself in the very special happiness of contemplation this autumn, and see what riches it will bring.

On a summer afternoon, when time had stilled, its moments blossoming wide and deep as sky, he reached for a peach from the picnic basket.   He felt the texture of its fuzzy skin against his lips as his teeth pressed into its fragrant flesh.  The burst of its tangy sweetness drenched his mouth.

From the lake’s edge, the laughter of the children floated up around him and willow boughs waltzed in the warm breeze casting shadows on the lush grass.  Finishing the peach, he stretched out on the blanket on the grass and gazed at the whipped cream clouds floating overhead beyond the willow’s branches.

He remembered how, when he was a child, the clouds took on the shapes of animals and soon he saw a lion and an elephant floating past.  He watched their shapes morph for awhile, and then he closed his eyes and bathed in the serenity of it all.

He wondered what stroke of fortune brought him to this unexpected moment, this island of tranquility.  He wondered how he had lost sight of how good it was to let himself feel this peace.  What a remarkable taste of happiness this was, he thought.  No urgency, no rush, no deadlines.

He knew all those things awaited him and that he would get lost again in their whirl.  But what if he could take this moment with him and relive it in the midst of the mad crush?

He pictured himself in the conference room with everybody huddled around the big walnut table, typing into their notebooks, texting on their phones, fighting to get their opinions heard.  And he saw himself leaning back in his chair, seeing elephant clouds floating over Jane’s head and smiling. Everyone would wonder what he was up to, he thought.  He laughed out loud.

On Wednesday, he gave it a whirl.  The elephant clouds turned into an idea for solving the problem at hand.  When he spoke it, he sounded so calm and sure that everyone listened.

At lunchtime, he walked to the deli and bought himself a peach.