Tag Archives: thoughts

Ten minutes to find happiness in your life

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How many people do you know who are unhappy with their lives? Some days it seems to me that more people are unhappy with their lives than are satisfied, let alone happy with their life. Usually these are people up to their late thirties. They are miserable. They feel locked in, chained down, and find little to be happiness from one day to the next.

I think  it is too bad so many people feel this way. They do not like their looks, what they do for a living, where they live, and what car they drive. They do not like their body, their face, their teeth, their hair. These desperate people spend a lot of money on fast fixes, and instant  gratification products. They buy products for the top of their head to the end of their toes, and they still are miserable.

So what do they do? They repeat the cycle over and over again. Maybe the hair color was not quite the right shade, the toothpaste does not get their teeth white enough. They go to parlors and have their body hair removed. After all that, it still does not help. Many people who have done all this feel just as bad as they did before they started the process.

If you ask them, they won’t admit it, but they feel like fakes. From the moment they wake up in the morning, to the time they go to bed at night they wear a mask covering up the real them. They worry down deep that at any second they might be exposed for what they really are. Every time they meet a stranger the fear wells up. Any stranger might look deep into their eyes and discern their secret.

Gosh, it must be horrible to go through each and every day in a situation like that. Knowing no matter what you do to improve the way you look, your hair color or hair style, or having your teeth re-whitened it you wake up unhappy. I first noticed this behavior in teenage girls when fitting in is more important than feeling good about yourself. As long as young women fit in, the down deep feelings do not matter.

Of course when I observe the men around me, I notice the same type of behavior. Young men growing into middle age, still making sure they fit in. It is rare to find a man who does not talk only about safe preferred topics. Once the top four or five of mens favorite subjects are talked though, the conversation begins to lag. It is the fitting that matters for men too.

Yet every neighborhood is overflowing with people who are unhappy with their lives and themselves. Men and Women living the American dream, and they are not satisfied with their lives.

I do not understand why they remain this way. The way to have a happier life is not some super secret, buried in some dusty old book. The key to a satisfying life is to start living life for yourself, not for other people. It is that simple, live your life for yourself, and the rest will fall in place. The hardest part of starting to be happy with your life is starting.

After so many years of doing the same things, talking about the same subjects, not letting anyone see your weaknesses, or the idea that you have an interest in something other than popular shallow conversation, it is very hard to change. Most people have been living imitation lives for so long, they no longer remember that once upon a time they liked themselves, and they really enjoyed hobbies and interests that others did not.

It is easy to change, take ten minutes today and think about yourself. Think about something you enjoy that you have not done forever. When you wake up tomorrow, take another ten minutes and do it. Being happy can be that simple.

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Smells and sounds in my day

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I find it interesting the things I smell throughout my day. Especially when I am out walking and there is nothing really on my mind and a smell catches my attention. Have you ever noticed those smells around you throughout the day? I find most of them pleasant, and some of them not so pleasant. Every now and then one slight odor or another brings me back to a time in the past I may not have thought about in many years. Skunk for instance, I find pleasant because of happy childhood memories the scent invokes.

Today, the first scent I noticed were coming from some hyacinths that are in bloom right now. As I walked along, the scent of apple blossoms came on the slight breeze. Next was the smell of laundry detergent and a too popular dryer sheet odor. It was from a man tinkering with his pickup truck. A while further around the blocks, and I caught the scent of cooking, not sure what it was, but someone knows how to cook!

Once I reach the park, there are people smells. The scent of young girl’s who walk along the walking path and do not quite know the correct amount of perfume to put on. To many of them buy scented everything and then put perfume on too..yuk! The women on the other hand smell much better unless they use Tide and Bounce…. Women over the age of thirty seem to develop smells that are unique to themselves. I do not know if this in intentional or not. Some older women smell like insecticide…not sure what that is about.

When the kids go by with their parents, they usually smell like the last junk food they ate. I think for children the smell of junk food is more important than the taste of junk food. So the kids go by smelling of strawberries, cherry, grape, chocolate, or other common snack foods they should not eat so much of.

Which brings me to the sounds that I hear to go along with the various scents and odors. Generally I listen to the birds, but that is interrupted at times from fifteen or twenty feet away from people and their portable music players. I usually do not mind what they are listening too, but they always have ear buds on, and I wonder if they know they are partially deaf. It is too bad that their spouses and babies have made or will make sighs and other sounds and they will not hear them. I wonder if they can even hear all the birds singing and the kids laughing?

Now that the weather is warming up, I also hear the rustle of the lizards in the shrubbery as they scurry along looking for bugs. Being in a desert environment there are lots of lizards. The ground squirrels are out with their babies, and where the rocks line part of the arroyos, they have their babies out learning about their world. They make some squeaking type noises, and also rustle the shrubbery. There are also rabbits doing the same thing, but I never hear them make any noise. Finally there are the ducks. They are normally quiet, but when they are in the reeds of the pond they like to fly into, the reeds make noise as they try to hide better.

My sister has a theory about the birds and their songs I think is worth sharing, for discussion if nothing else. She studies and watches nature a lot, reading books, comparing, and thinking about animals. She told me one day that she thinks that the songs of birds were given to birds by God. God she says wanted a way to keep the animals and we humans calm during our lifetime, so God created bird songs that acts like an umbrella of calmness around the earth. Anything living on the earth is subject to the calming influence of this global network of bird songs. Whether this thinking has any basis in fact is an area I doubt any research has been done, but I do enjoy listening to the birds singing their songs as I walk.

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Baby to Adult to Dying, enjoy the whole trip

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I had an interesting thought today. I was thinking about growing from a baby to a young child. I have never seen truly happy babies during this stage of life. Most days are filled with frustrations of things they can not do yet. Most of the frustration is usually because their minds start to envision things their bodies do not know how to do yet.

From thinking about babies and the frustration they go through because their wants advances their abilities, that we in the end of our lives suffer from our bodies advancing our thinking! We do not remember the frustrations we lived through from about six months to three or four years old when we wanted to do something, but we could not, because we had not developed our fine motor skills yet.

Our diets change too as the years go by. One day we are walking along and it is lunch time. We think we want pizza for lunch. Our favorite pizza, the same combination we have been eating for at least twenty years now. We order, receive, and start to eat our favorite pizza. Suddenly it does not taste as satisfying as it did just last week when we treated ourselves to a slice of pizza.

Even our thinking changes in our later years. I can not speak for women, but for men, sex is the main brain topic from waking to sleeping, and maybe during sleep too. Men go through their lives talking with women in every conceivable circumstance, yet in their minds they are usually thinking about sex with the women of interest at the moment. It is just the way men are built. Suddenly one day a man realizes he is talking with a woman and something is different! It takes a few seconds, but he realizes that for the first time in his adolescent to adult life, he sees the woman in front of him as a person, not as a possible sex object.

Some parts of getting old are not so interesting or benign. For some of us little things we took for granted such as proper body function now quit working in the most humiliating, or embarrassing ways. We become incontinent. We become a gas factory that could probably supply the Country’s methane gas needs daily. We have trouble digesting foods that we used to love, or certain foods now give us a stomach ache.
 
When we think we can not take any more, the real diseases set in. We have high blood pressure, heart trouble, eye problems, back problems, pains and aches that come and go and sometimes come and decide to stay.

Most people of course do not find this time of life too enjoyable. How can they with their bodies falling apart? I am starting to wonder though how can we not enjoy this time of ending? Our bodies have given us great service for so many years, and they are now getting tired. Our bodies are now taking control of the end of our lives, and no matter what we would like to do about it, what we can do is mostly limited to observation.
 
Our trouble is we can not just observe, we have to observe with opinion and emotion. I think we need to become more proactive and observe with happiness, and contentment, possibly even enjoyment. We may not be able to control getting old and dying, but we can control how we react to it.

We can choose how what emotions we allow into our lives as our bodies start to do what is natural after so many years of life. I hope for myself at least I can find enjoyment in the way my body shuts itself down. I can not do anything about it, and I enjoyed my body at its best, so the least I can do is enjoy the idea, it is doing what it thinks is best for me.

In essence, I can enjoy and appreciate that my body is doing the best it can with the every day more limited resources it has to work with. This seems more natural to me, and much better than being bitter and resentful that my body which served me so well, is now shutting itself down because it has no more to give.

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