I wrote this in response to another blog, but realized it was too long for a comment, and decided to make it a topic here.
I think happiness is relative. Some days you are having a fabulous day, others just seem neither happy nor sad (a blah day if you will), and still others are just plain awful. I have noticed with myself, and this is something I've been doing since I was a kid, that I don't give myself enough credit. I never feel worthy to even exist sometimes. But I've realized, very slowly, that this is not true. I think it's just the perfectionist in me saying those things. But I think perhaps I could be happier if I give myself some compliments when I do do well here and there. If I do that, maybe I'll be better at accepting them, and even giving them more to others.
I'm sort of going on a tangent here, but it's easier to be hard on yourself, to allow life to get you down, to be nasty, to stay the same and keep up harmful ways than it is to be the opposite. I have been working to get myself back to a place of acceptance where I realize life is the journey that I am on now. It's not as easy as when we were students with worries about homework and grades etc. I (and people in general) have been a student for so long, life after school has seemed foreign to me. I didn't realize that after graduation I'd have to go through another stage of life. This consisting of finding my place in the world once I had the education to play a contributive role in the symphony of life.
I've come to realize, perhaps even matured, that I should live life day by day. Every day is a new beginning to start anew. It’s awesome. If one day is bad, that doesn’t mean the next day will be. What a great gift God has given us to have each day start fresh, with a clean slate! It is my hope that by making the effort to be more positive, it will eventually become habit, and I won't be so hard on myself for my numerous faults and annoyances.
One day I was walking down the hallway at school, and mid-thought I turn to the art teacher putting up artwork. I said, "Isn't teaching to some extent teaching habit?" Think about it, in grade school you learn to use scissors. If you use the scissors wrong you could injure yourself, others, or have a badly shaped cut-out. If you learned to use them correctly then you can make wonderful artwork, use them to open packages etc, the outcome being positive. But you have to practice at cutting, coloring, singing whatever you are doing in life in order to reach the designated goal. After a while, your practice becomes habit and you don't even have to think about how, it just is. Seriously do you ever think about how you learned to cut, color, sing to the radio, dance to a song, to read? Not really, because it's habit. So in conclusion then, making an effort to be more positive should result in a more positive me eventually. The goal for me is to be more accepting of myself, and in turn I think this will help my relationships with other people just be better in general.
It's like the priest said at a wedding I went to back in the day. "Love is a decision. You make the decision to love. Marriage is about making a decision and a commitment to love the person you are with everyday." Love is also a habit, like exercising everyday, brushing your teeth, or being positive. Isn't it good to know that if you feel down, you do have some control over it? You can make an effort every day to be positive, and eventually it will be so habitual it will be a part of you, just as easy as pie that you won't even realize it. Learning is about making good habits a part of your life. Maybe you knew this already, but I didn't bring this thought to fruition until I started thinking about how to teach lil' kiddos. I had to think, how did I learn to sing? How did I learn to find the beat in music? How did I learn to jump rope or to use scissors? Things we take for granted are the things little kids learn; they are habits. We learn to make good choices for our lives, utilizing good habits so that they are built-in life-skills that we use for the rest of our lives!
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