Day 34? of the Happiness Project

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.

Badly Drawn Wummin

According to Selfridges windae display - 60% of people are ashamed of their bodies.

I'd say, most of them are standing in a changing room.

20th of May, long, long ago

In another world, parallel to this one, if things had gone differently, I would be celebrating a mammoth 31 years of being married to the same person.  Thirty one years.  Such a long time.  Even if you subtract six from it for the length of time it's been since the marriage ended, it's a long time; a lifetime, literally.  The lifetime of all four of my kids.

It makes me so hugely sad.  Desperately, achingly so.  Even after six years, the sorrow chokes me still.  I want my dream back.  But then, if I try, I can remember too the horrid days at the end of the road - the grief, the agony, the pain, and that's not something I want to hold on to.  But it's funny, isn't it, the way when you reminisce that it's often the cream that rises to the top - the happy times, the good days, the special moments, and not the dross of petty betrayals and more serious wounds.

So, on facebook, that bible of human endeavor, my friend posted this:

and I realised that I'd failed singularly at the last point.  Sorry Buddha.  I was, and still struggle to let go of the past, which was patently not meant for me.  I've tried to be gracious and 'realistic' and in all outward appearances, I probably have been, but inside, and here, I am like a kid with a lolly stick, unwilling to throw it away because I want to eat it again, despite there being nothing left but an orange stained bit of wood.   And so I hold it in my sticky fingers and wail.  Wah wah.

This, despite knowing that I'm better, happier, nicer, more content, more centred, more fulfilled now than I ever was when married.  But.

that's what I'd add to the Buddha list.  a big fat 12p courier bold but

there are no buts in Buddhism though. 

Oh well.  Tomorrow is another day of no significance to anyone

(except we actually had the Muslim ceremony on the 21st, so...)

(and don't even get me started on the dead dad thing!)