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| "You hit a goal, you keep a resolution." Photo from Google Images |
It was at the end of the book that I realized this, when I was reading her tips on how to start your own happiness project. It said that aside from thinking of what makes you feel good, you should also think of areas in your life that make you feel bad, that don't feel right, that require more growth. Looking at the big picture of my life, I'm in a good place. But upon closer examination, there are areas I want to improve on:
1. Exercise more often. Because the book suggests making it a concrete, actionable goal, I need to set a specific time of day to get on the treadmill. On the days that I have work, I plan to park much farther than I usually do so that it's a considerable walk to the office.
2. Find time for prayer. Honestly, I end my day with a phone call from my fiance, not with prayer. I don't start my day with prayer either, and just find myself talking to God randomly throughout the day. Which is not a bad thing, but there had been a point in my life where I was able to meditate and write on my journal on a daily basis. I need to carve out some quiet time in my life, and I think it entails waking up earlier every day.
3. Read a book. A confession: I love reading in the toilet. Where other people bring a magazine or the newspaper, I bring my books. But ever since I got an iPad (and later on, an iPhone), I found myself using Toilet Time to browse Facebook instead. I decided to bring back my old habit by starting with The Happiness Project and realized that I could actually work through my never-ending book list by reading just a chapter every day, one book at a time. It would be a bonus if I could find the time to lounge in my big chair with a book, but at least I've come up with a minimum requirement.
4. Blog more often. Being able to blog on a daily basis seems to be a difficult goal to achieve. Not only because I'm busy with work, but I also find that I don't have so much to share every day. When I was much younger, I had an opinion on everything and itched to blog, sometimes more than once a day, every day. But as I grew older, I realized that you don't have to have an opinion about everything, and even if you do, the whole world doesn't need to know about it. Editing my thoughts and the words that come out of my mouth has been a worthy exercise all these years because it means that I try to say things that I mean and in the precise way that I want to say them. I do want to keep this blog going though, so I think I just need to be realistic about how often I want to share things that are actually meaningful and worth talking about. Maybe once a week is doable?
5. Spend more time offline. Now that I have a job that requires me to be online and "always on" (and I have the gadgets to make it easier to really be always on, anytime, anywhere), I need to make a conscious effort to unplug and spend some time offline. When I think about it, some of what I can do for my job can actually be done offline, like brainstorming or mapping out a structure, then I can just go online again to flesh out the ideas. There is something to be said about sitting away from a computer, thinking without looking at a screen, getting up to stretch every so often. And because my work requires me to be online much of the time, as much as possible I'd like to spend my non-work hours offline.
I suppose these five things are enough for now. The book actually encourages you to come up with things like your Splendid Truths (which are basically words you live by), or a list of things that make you happy, but there is a danger for me to get caught up in making the lists, such that I forget about actually getting up to do something. So maybe it's better that I've started with the resolutions, right as the year draws to a close. At least I have time for a bit of a dry run!
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