Go With Happy
If you are in a great mood and want to maintain it, you must be vigilant. Positivity is not the norm and others, oozing with grumpy, are more than ready to step on your happy. I pick my children up from school at 2:45 pm. By 3 pm one of them has not just stepped on, but stomped the hell out of, my happy.
Ironic to the title of this post, the first hour and a half of every day of my life sucks pretty bad. I know sucking is a relative term, so I feel the need to say that I don’t take my blessings for granted. We have food, we have a roof, we have love. I am fortunate to possess all three.
But, now back to the sucking. I am a night owl. I hate alarms and love sleep. I planned my college course schedule around which classes would least disrupt my normal slumber patterns. My dad tried to talk me out of a career in elementary teaching because he knew arriving to work by 8 am would be a challenge for me. He may have also noticed that I never babysat or particularly showed an interest in kids.
Therefore, I am just as perplexed as anyone that life brought me to the role of waking 5 kids to aid in preparing them for school or sports or doctor appointments or just breathing every.single.day.
I perform my mom duties with more grace on some days than others. I admit to grumbling while packing lunches once in awhile and cursing at the laundry slightly more often, especially during baseball season. Some of my responsibilities are results of my own choices while some were dumped in my lap by life with a notice of, “Here, deal with this and try to smile about it!” Either way, responsibilities can quite literally suck the life out of you if you allow them to drop your level of joy.
Now for the “going with happy part!” I do not try to trick myself into enjoying the sucky things. I have never been able to scrub a toilet bowl with a smile; I am too scared of poop germs on my teeth.
However, since IÂ get to choose what I think about,
- I choose to think of things that make me happy whenever possible, even during the sucky stuff. While I’m scrubbing the cereal-turned-cement out of bowls in the kitchen sink, I stare out the window and envision our family enjoying the pool I hope to have one day. When one of my darlings hops in the car and immediately begins arguing with one of the others about whose day it is for the front seat, I daydream about an adult vacation on a beach far away. If I stare off into space while I take this mental escape, in the very least, it frightens the people around me just enough to produce a puzzled look on them before they rush away.
Very often, others cross my path and seem to feel I’m the perfect sounding board for how crappy everything has went in their day, week, month, year or existence. The more I care about the person, the more I find their bad mood can make me feel worse out of sheer empathy. If the cashier tells me how much she hates her job, I’m less affected than when my Man is on a rant about how much his life sucks. Either way, the complaints of others have the potential to encourage me to find what is wrong in my life so that we share a common bond; we can agree that life sucks! This is when vigilance becomes involved. To continue a high vibe when someone around me is in a less than Rainbows & Moonbeam mood,
- I look around for an image that simply evokes appreciation. I literally look for a tree, cloud, flower, dog, baby – something (anything) that is pleasing to my eyes.
These 7 pictures were taken when I took a moment to appreciate the beauty of life that was right in front of me. These pictures are saved on my phone. Now they are on my website. When I get real energetic, I may print them and place them all around my house and car. When my pessimistic mind or one of my crabby housemates is on a rant, perusing these pictures makes me feel better in that they take my complete focus off of the suck of life. I know a woman who posts any daily sight that strikes her, like a fabulous pattern tile in a public restroom, to a Facebook photo album titled “The View.” This allows her to access them whenever needed and share with her friends and family, who may also benefit from taking a few minutes a day to escape thoughts with aesthetics.
Despite my tactics to maintain cheerfulness, I have found that my pissed-off mind is not a wussy. There have been times when I felt exuberant, just to find a small voice inside of me wondering now what’s going to go wrong. I am accoustomed to merriment being short-lived, the bottom dropping out and something else suckish presenting itself. In other words, I’m worried about letting myself be Too Happy. To get through this nonsense, I go with happy. Enjoying the peaceful moment > worrying about some crap that is sure to eventually show up. If my mind doesn’t cooperate, sleep hits my reset button. If my nap steps right on someone else’s happy, that is something their mental will have to work on.