When Happiness Arises

I am most happy in a few circumstances. The first is when I have a big bowl of lentils ready to eat (see recipe) with a show to watch while I do so!

However, probably the one thing that makes me the most happy is when I’m just poking around town spending time at coffee shops reading and writing, searching for reads at book stores, and sifting through and trying on clothes at thrift stores. Traveling by foot between these locations gets fresh air in my lungs and endorphins in my blood, and I have opportunities to spot cool things of which to take photos (which is a budding interest. In fact, I’d like the images on this blog to primarily be of photos that I take rather than royalty-free ones. So, in my vision, I’m sharing my writings and my photos, cool! We love art and expression).

I love going to bed, especially with an established sleep schedule and/or when I’m confident that I’ll fall asleep quickly.

Reading, writing, saxophone, and piano are my big four hobbies. When I commit some time to each of them, it’s almost certainly going to be a great, happy day. But the happiness generated by these activities is formally different than my poking around town example, perhaps as a function of the focus they require versus the movement and human interaction entailed in the latter. Perhaps with the exception of reading, the others – writing, saxophone, and piano – certainly feel more like duties or things I ought to be doing – I do feel anxiety when I’m not ‘being productive,’ which is unfortunate. I’d love to want to do these activities (don’t get me wrong, sometimes I do), but to give another example, when I was training for my marathon, I usually didn’t want to go for a run, but after doing so I always felt great. Same with these hobbies.

This arc that I’m in – embracing and sharing my craft – makes me very happy and makes me feel more like myself.