Happy

I Am Happiest When [No.42]

We’ve become impoverished There are many ways to be and become impoverished.  Financial impoverishment is often the most visible and unignorable.  But you can become impoverished when it comes to your wellbeing, when it comes to your time, when it comes to your sense of loving life. Too many of us are stressed, harassed and […]

I Am Happiest When [No.41]

Write your own map At some point on any journey, you have to put the map down.  You have to get off the bus.  You have to stop doing the things that other people suggest and recommend.  You have to stop orienting yourself on others ideas and opinions. And you have to find your own […]

I Am Happiest When [No.40]

I get inspiration from many sources. In a novel I’m reading now, one of the characters, a somewhat world-weary young man, comments to his more ambitious and worldly friend: “We’ve lost our spiritual values.  People are happy to live in a moral and ethical void.  They’ve lost all sense of mystery and gratitude and wonder. They […]

I Am Happiest When [No.39]

Happiness is the ultimate currency When I started my year-long experiment with happiness, I deliberately didn’t do too much reading about the topic. I didn’t order in dozens of books on happiness (which would only be a small fraction of the books available to be purchased on this topic). And the reason is I didn’t […]

I Am Happiest When [No.38]

The death earlier this week by comic genius Robin Williams reminds us of how little we really know about other people’s lives and how they are experiencing them. Here a man presumably who had so much to live for, so much success, so much fame, so much fortune (although reports state he was in dire […]

I Am Happiest When [No.37]

I’ve stopped trying to improve myself The self improvement industry is humungous.  It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, spreading its tentacles into every corner of the globe.  There’s even a new religion based on the idea and central principle of never-ending self improvement. I myself have been a big user of the self improvement industry.  I’ve spent more […]

I Am Happiest When [No.36]

I am happiest when I am tuned into the wisdom of the ancients and the inner voice of knowing. When I hear, really hear, universal truths that transcend time, space, culture and opinion. When I stop listening to the constant chatter that seems to be all around us all the time: noise that obscures and unsettles. And […]

I Am Happiest When [No.35]

I’m reading Tal Ben-Shahar’s outstanding book Happier.  I’m only partway through and already it’s producing pure gold in terms of new, fresh ways of thinking about (and by extension, if applied, experiencing) happiness. I love the “Hamburger” model Professor Ben-Shahar shares early in the book.  He describes four ways of approaching and living your life […]

I Am Happiest When [No.34]

Two kinds of unhappy I’ve discovered two kinds of unhappiness.   And it’s an important difference, a substantial difference. The first kind of unhappy is the kind that immobilises you, that knocks you down so you’re not sure you can ever get up, or that there’s really any point to getting up.  This kind of unhappy flattens you. […]

I Am Happiest When [No.33]

Laughter is the best medicine The Readers Digest had a regular feature in their monthly magazine called that – laughter is the best medicine.  As a kid growing up in a mining town in Central Queensland, Australia, I had no idea what that meant. An esteemed publication suggests that comedy is indeed better than medication.  It […]