I say 34, but actually it's a ball park 34 as I've lost count. But give or take a day or two, that's a whole month of HAPPY, HAPPY, HAPPY. Picture me chanting and clinking little cymbals, dancing down Oxford street - but no, it's not like that, it's more of a quiet pleasure.
Mindfulness, people keep saying to me, as in 'isn't that mindfulness?' and it is, I guess, sort of, kinda, though I see it more as just old fashioned stopping to smell the roses, and making more time to hang around by the rose bush, but doesn't it say something about modern life that in order to enjoy it, we have to have a special noun to describe something that should be the whole basis of our existence. What are we alive for, and what do we do all the struggling for, and the chores, and the angst and the routine, if not to take pleasure in our lives?
It's true I had got out of the habit. I spent more time worrying about everything and anything, as though my troubles (real and imagined) were beads on a rosary that I had to pick off, one by one, every day and obsess over, instead of realising that tackling your problems is not the same as be at them. So I swapped the beads, and now I just try to count the good moments, and there are suprisingly many of them.
Mindfulness, people keep saying to me, as in 'isn't that mindfulness?' and it is, I guess, sort of, kinda, though I see it more as just old fashioned stopping to smell the roses, and making more time to hang around by the rose bush, but doesn't it say something about modern life that in order to enjoy it, we have to have a special noun to describe something that should be the whole basis of our existence. What are we alive for, and what do we do all the struggling for, and the chores, and the angst and the routine, if not to take pleasure in our lives?
It's true I had got out of the habit. I spent more time worrying about everything and anything, as though my troubles (real and imagined) were beads on a rosary that I had to pick off, one by one, every day and obsess over, instead of realising that tackling your problems is not the same as be at them. So I swapped the beads, and now I just try to count the good moments, and there are suprisingly many of them.
