Make good choices of course would be one of the key ingredients to happiness. For example i was about to write this blog about some crazy stuff that went down at the school last week, but then i came to my senses and realized that i would just be offending a large group of people that take themselves too seriously and are hyper-prone to losing their shit over the things i would end up writing. Why do that? Sure points could be made, but in some cases wounds are better left alone to heal rather than to poke at and ridicule.
So by choosing to write about ways to be happy i have almost guaranteed a better fate for myself and my person while interacting among an important community i am part of... right.
Choosing positive thoughts surly must beget happiness more frequently than mocking emotional mistakes made by others would, even if the sentence is odd. Which brings us nicely into another key to happiness.
It's OK to laugh at yourself, you are allowed to make mistakes and be foolish, and it's even better if you can see the error of your ways. You can't change what you are not aware of so witnessing your folly is half the battle, and forgiving yourself will repair most of the damage, and if you can laugh at yourself then you might just turn it into a net positive. I know i know, i sound like some new age jackass, but don't worry nobody reads blogs anymore... i read that in a tweet. Blogs are too wordy, we need to be on to our next packet of semi-information in under 10 seconds now... it's the new way.
I'll defend the blog format, for me right now i am not looking at the Internet searching mindlessly for something that i might find interesting... I'm in my head trying to articulate and understand what things i can do to be happy... some kind of interactive meditation practice. It's kind of leading us into another point that i didn't know i was about to make until just now when i saw it clearly... as obvious as a black hockey puck on a clean white sheet of ice. Why do you do things? If i was worried about who was going to read this, or even worse "will this reach a growing target audience", i would be in a completely different head space... the word "stress" comes to mind. Actually writing the words "growing target audience" took a bit of wind out of the sails, but then i remembered the context.
Doing things for the right reasons is a real big one... it kind of falls under the opening category of making good choices. Money is one of the bigger trip wires out there, because of course we all need money for sure. I'd like to try a world where it didn't work that way, and if everybody wants to give it a shot I'll give it my best 110%. Now we have moved on to reality... a good thing to be aware of for sure. Understanding reality has to be on a list of things to do to be happy... just don't take it too seriously, be willing to shift your reality, or perhaps corporate speak might coin a term "flexible reality"... almost tempted to Google that but that could send me on a wild goose chase that will have me watching legends of hockey on YouTube in 4 hours after another 15 beers... right.
On that note reality can be different depending on where you live so the "flexible reality" idea does have merit. I live in Portland Oregon in one of those "keep it weird" neighbourhoods... of course I'm from Canada where we put a "u" in that word, but lets say i lived in Texas or Moscow or Palestine or Kingston Jamaica... well my reality would be very different. When possible i would suggest living in a place that you really like. Often times people end up living in a place they don't enjoy and it's because of a job, or they are afraid to move, or they can't move, or they have some obligation. Some people live in the suburbs of Cities because they can afford a bigger house and then they spend their life in a traffic jam... their reality is constant commuting, which is a price i could never pay for a bigger house.
When i was 22 i taught Chemistry and Physics in a high school in downtown Toronto for the summer session (summer school) and i lived in my parents house in the suburbs (Scarborough). Twice in one week the highway (401) was completely blocked because a tractor trailer overturned... luckily the last time the car behind me had a football so we ran some plays for a few hours. But i remember that day very clearly where i said to myself I will never commute through a city in a car ever again... and i never have. I commuted by bike from downtown Vancouver to Richmond for a number of years but on a bike one can always beat a traffic jam. I don't commute, and i never will because i fucking HATE it... I'd almost rather hire a group of squirrels to leaf blow my yard than commute to a job as a matter of principle. So in my life the option of commuting is off the table... i won't do it, so i look for another solution. Now some people don't mind commuting, and that's good for them... their car is their happy place, with the music they love pumping away, and their little environment just the way they like it. They have a different reality than myself and that's all good, if they are happy I am happy for them.
Hey there is another point... be happy for people. It's amazing how infectious happiness can be... you could choose to be jealous of somebody who is set to fly off to Hawaii in January because you are stuck in winter, but then you are just jealous and that is kind of a negative emotion, an emotion where you feel sorry for yourself. How does feeling sorry for yourself help? Feel happy for that person and you will find that you just accidentally tapped into happiness, open yourself up to other peoples joy... there is nothing wrong with vicarious living if the dream is good... hot damn that's a good tweet! OK so i just tweeted that, but i didn't read any tweets and i got right back off the Internet to avoid distraction, cause this exercise is fun right... remember I'm talking to myself so no need to answer.
Sympathy... there is a time and a place for sympathy, but i think it's one of those things that kind of gets out of hand. There is a whole type of person who is constantly trying to garner sympathy... most of the unhappy people i know are constantly playing an angle where people should feel sorry for them because something happened to them. Never do i want somebody to feel bad for me because things went wrong. I kind of come from a family of people who are often lobbying for sympathy... it kind of drives me crazy. In truth i think it is rooted in the idea that somebody wants to be recognized for the amount of effort they feel that had to make, but like i said before if you are doing something with the idea of what people will think of you, then you are on the wrong track to happiness. The sympathy seeker will always inject something that they had to do that they didn't want to do that has put them in the particular mood that they are in in the moment. What kind of bullshit is that to lay on somebody... now you want me to feel bad for you? If i fill my being with sorrow you will feel better? Is that the deal? So if we are both unhappy then the field has been leveled? Don't get me wrong... if somebody has suffered a tragic loss, i do want to help to try and absorb some of the pain, and i will gladly be honored to be chosen as a person who could provide that in a case where needed. But i can't feel sorry for a person who is late because the got caught in a traffic jam coming back from a job they hate. It's wasted sorrow... right! My grieving can't solve the problem, because the problem is guaranteed to happen again based on the simple law of averages. I might be willing to help lead an intervention to help identify the source of this unhappiness, but there needs to be a willingness on the sympathy seeker's behalf to work outside their known "box". So lets put "Rejecting the need for sympathy" on the list of How to be Happy... get out of that pattern.
How about this one... Be critical. It doesn't have to embody the complete negative that is often associated with the word. Critically analyze things you are involved in with the mindset on how to make them better. Often we avoid critical thinking because we don't want to be critical... did i just smell another tweet? Where was I? Being sucked into the world of chaos against my stated better judgement due to lazy habits.
I got another one... Avoid Morons. Avoiding irritating people is a huge boon to happiness... it's massive. The curmudgeon may actually be a perfectly sane and happy person who just lost the will to suffer the tragedy of the human condition... did you ever think that?... i know i didn't before a few minutes ago when i thought it. I might be towing an empty boat on that one... it's a trap of course... because the curmudgeon lost the way to deal with his reality and failed to change it... right. I got a few more tweets out of this paragraph. Is tweet blogging a thing? I feel like I'm on to something, but I've felt that before only to be stopped like a bad check (see my music "career"). Remember laughing at yourself is one of the keys. Key...
A key will get you in
It's key what you give
Through a need to please
Honesty is the seed
Live life with the heart of a lover
Walk tall and you shall hover
Those are song lyrics i wrote... it's all the words of the song and it repeats 2x, the song is called "the key of 5" and it's on the 21 tandem repeats CD "No Junk Mail Please", an album that got savagely thrashed in the Canadian Music press in around 2008. It's good to release an album and take a beating in the press, it helps you develop a thick skin and challenges your resolve to do what you think is right for your reality, over what people might think of you. I wouldn't consider myself a famous person, unless i was writing a song challenging the idea of fame, but i have been written about in the press a fair number of times... i have had scintillating reviews and i have been shish kabobed. Neither praise nor flogging should affect one's will to pursue the path that they are on.
When i look back on one of the more negative reviews of that particular CD i recall something along the lines of "it would be nice if they pretended to care about enjoying playing music". Now at that time it's true we were focused on playing slower tempos... and i believe it was a reaction to others playing faster and faster to really "rock it". It takes a lot of focus to not to speed up when playing music... i needed to understand that dynamic. It's punk attitude going slow and soft in a town of loud and fast, which is ironic at best and shitty at worst. In the end i learned to play restrained in a scene where people had to play loud and fast to compete with the audience talking. If you are fast and loud you don't hear the audience talking, so it's an easy sell... but then you are part of the system... the one you are tying to break. Breaking things is great too... breaking rules is highly liberating, if it's a stupid rule all the better... stupid rules should be broken... it erodes their authority. But don't get that confused with fucking up people's shit, a rebel and an ass hole are different beings... don't be the latter because it will affect your happiness.
These are some things that might help with general happiness, don't thank me, i spent the last few hours thinking i was doing something i was involved in, and that's what i set out to do.
So by choosing to write about ways to be happy i have almost guaranteed a better fate for myself and my person while interacting among an important community i am part of... right.
Choosing positive thoughts surly must beget happiness more frequently than mocking emotional mistakes made by others would, even if the sentence is odd. Which brings us nicely into another key to happiness.
It's OK to laugh at yourself, you are allowed to make mistakes and be foolish, and it's even better if you can see the error of your ways. You can't change what you are not aware of so witnessing your folly is half the battle, and forgiving yourself will repair most of the damage, and if you can laugh at yourself then you might just turn it into a net positive. I know i know, i sound like some new age jackass, but don't worry nobody reads blogs anymore... i read that in a tweet. Blogs are too wordy, we need to be on to our next packet of semi-information in under 10 seconds now... it's the new way.
I'll defend the blog format, for me right now i am not looking at the Internet searching mindlessly for something that i might find interesting... I'm in my head trying to articulate and understand what things i can do to be happy... some kind of interactive meditation practice. It's kind of leading us into another point that i didn't know i was about to make until just now when i saw it clearly... as obvious as a black hockey puck on a clean white sheet of ice. Why do you do things? If i was worried about who was going to read this, or even worse "will this reach a growing target audience", i would be in a completely different head space... the word "stress" comes to mind. Actually writing the words "growing target audience" took a bit of wind out of the sails, but then i remembered the context.
Doing things for the right reasons is a real big one... it kind of falls under the opening category of making good choices. Money is one of the bigger trip wires out there, because of course we all need money for sure. I'd like to try a world where it didn't work that way, and if everybody wants to give it a shot I'll give it my best 110%. Now we have moved on to reality... a good thing to be aware of for sure. Understanding reality has to be on a list of things to do to be happy... just don't take it too seriously, be willing to shift your reality, or perhaps corporate speak might coin a term "flexible reality"... almost tempted to Google that but that could send me on a wild goose chase that will have me watching legends of hockey on YouTube in 4 hours after another 15 beers... right.
On that note reality can be different depending on where you live so the "flexible reality" idea does have merit. I live in Portland Oregon in one of those "keep it weird" neighbourhoods... of course I'm from Canada where we put a "u" in that word, but lets say i lived in Texas or Moscow or Palestine or Kingston Jamaica... well my reality would be very different. When possible i would suggest living in a place that you really like. Often times people end up living in a place they don't enjoy and it's because of a job, or they are afraid to move, or they can't move, or they have some obligation. Some people live in the suburbs of Cities because they can afford a bigger house and then they spend their life in a traffic jam... their reality is constant commuting, which is a price i could never pay for a bigger house.
When i was 22 i taught Chemistry and Physics in a high school in downtown Toronto for the summer session (summer school) and i lived in my parents house in the suburbs (Scarborough). Twice in one week the highway (401) was completely blocked because a tractor trailer overturned... luckily the last time the car behind me had a football so we ran some plays for a few hours. But i remember that day very clearly where i said to myself I will never commute through a city in a car ever again... and i never have. I commuted by bike from downtown Vancouver to Richmond for a number of years but on a bike one can always beat a traffic jam. I don't commute, and i never will because i fucking HATE it... I'd almost rather hire a group of squirrels to leaf blow my yard than commute to a job as a matter of principle. So in my life the option of commuting is off the table... i won't do it, so i look for another solution. Now some people don't mind commuting, and that's good for them... their car is their happy place, with the music they love pumping away, and their little environment just the way they like it. They have a different reality than myself and that's all good, if they are happy I am happy for them.
Hey there is another point... be happy for people. It's amazing how infectious happiness can be... you could choose to be jealous of somebody who is set to fly off to Hawaii in January because you are stuck in winter, but then you are just jealous and that is kind of a negative emotion, an emotion where you feel sorry for yourself. How does feeling sorry for yourself help? Feel happy for that person and you will find that you just accidentally tapped into happiness, open yourself up to other peoples joy... there is nothing wrong with vicarious living if the dream is good... hot damn that's a good tweet! OK so i just tweeted that, but i didn't read any tweets and i got right back off the Internet to avoid distraction, cause this exercise is fun right... remember I'm talking to myself so no need to answer.
Sympathy... there is a time and a place for sympathy, but i think it's one of those things that kind of gets out of hand. There is a whole type of person who is constantly trying to garner sympathy... most of the unhappy people i know are constantly playing an angle where people should feel sorry for them because something happened to them. Never do i want somebody to feel bad for me because things went wrong. I kind of come from a family of people who are often lobbying for sympathy... it kind of drives me crazy. In truth i think it is rooted in the idea that somebody wants to be recognized for the amount of effort they feel that had to make, but like i said before if you are doing something with the idea of what people will think of you, then you are on the wrong track to happiness. The sympathy seeker will always inject something that they had to do that they didn't want to do that has put them in the particular mood that they are in in the moment. What kind of bullshit is that to lay on somebody... now you want me to feel bad for you? If i fill my being with sorrow you will feel better? Is that the deal? So if we are both unhappy then the field has been leveled? Don't get me wrong... if somebody has suffered a tragic loss, i do want to help to try and absorb some of the pain, and i will gladly be honored to be chosen as a person who could provide that in a case where needed. But i can't feel sorry for a person who is late because the got caught in a traffic jam coming back from a job they hate. It's wasted sorrow... right! My grieving can't solve the problem, because the problem is guaranteed to happen again based on the simple law of averages. I might be willing to help lead an intervention to help identify the source of this unhappiness, but there needs to be a willingness on the sympathy seeker's behalf to work outside their known "box". So lets put "Rejecting the need for sympathy" on the list of How to be Happy... get out of that pattern.
How about this one... Be critical. It doesn't have to embody the complete negative that is often associated with the word. Critically analyze things you are involved in with the mindset on how to make them better. Often we avoid critical thinking because we don't want to be critical... did i just smell another tweet? Where was I? Being sucked into the world of chaos against my stated better judgement due to lazy habits.
I got another one... Avoid Morons. Avoiding irritating people is a huge boon to happiness... it's massive. The curmudgeon may actually be a perfectly sane and happy person who just lost the will to suffer the tragedy of the human condition... did you ever think that?... i know i didn't before a few minutes ago when i thought it. I might be towing an empty boat on that one... it's a trap of course... because the curmudgeon lost the way to deal with his reality and failed to change it... right. I got a few more tweets out of this paragraph. Is tweet blogging a thing? I feel like I'm on to something, but I've felt that before only to be stopped like a bad check (see my music "career"). Remember laughing at yourself is one of the keys. Key...
A key will get you in
It's key what you give
Through a need to please
Honesty is the seed
Live life with the heart of a lover
Walk tall and you shall hover
Those are song lyrics i wrote... it's all the words of the song and it repeats 2x, the song is called "the key of 5" and it's on the 21 tandem repeats CD "No Junk Mail Please", an album that got savagely thrashed in the Canadian Music press in around 2008. It's good to release an album and take a beating in the press, it helps you develop a thick skin and challenges your resolve to do what you think is right for your reality, over what people might think of you. I wouldn't consider myself a famous person, unless i was writing a song challenging the idea of fame, but i have been written about in the press a fair number of times... i have had scintillating reviews and i have been shish kabobed. Neither praise nor flogging should affect one's will to pursue the path that they are on.
When i look back on one of the more negative reviews of that particular CD i recall something along the lines of "it would be nice if they pretended to care about enjoying playing music". Now at that time it's true we were focused on playing slower tempos... and i believe it was a reaction to others playing faster and faster to really "rock it". It takes a lot of focus to not to speed up when playing music... i needed to understand that dynamic. It's punk attitude going slow and soft in a town of loud and fast, which is ironic at best and shitty at worst. In the end i learned to play restrained in a scene where people had to play loud and fast to compete with the audience talking. If you are fast and loud you don't hear the audience talking, so it's an easy sell... but then you are part of the system... the one you are tying to break. Breaking things is great too... breaking rules is highly liberating, if it's a stupid rule all the better... stupid rules should be broken... it erodes their authority. But don't get that confused with fucking up people's shit, a rebel and an ass hole are different beings... don't be the latter because it will affect your happiness.
These are some things that might help with general happiness, don't thank me, i spent the last few hours thinking i was doing something i was involved in, and that's what i set out to do.
