So, I've been reading a pretty cool book lately, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. I stumbled upon it via a link from another blog, which ironically enough ended up being another book by the exact same title. I tried to find that book on Amazon, and ended up finding Gretchen Rubin's book, being interested, and you can see where it goes from there. Incidentally, I still haven't found that other happiness project, but I like this one, so that's probably good enough.
Gretchen's quest and mine seemed to have some similarities, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought mine should be like hers. Several of my changes have been focused on more efficient use of my time, but what I really had wanted was focusing my time to the things I enjoy, i.e. the things that make me happy. It's an interesting semantic difference between making changes to become the me I want to be, and accepting the me that I actually am inside, making changes to bring that me out more. You should really just read Rubin's book, since she says it all a lot better than I do, but the end result is that I'm still making changes, but they may be more happiness-oriented in the short term.
In the very short term, I'm leading off with something that I don't think is in the book, but ties in to being happier. I'm going to try to smile more. This kind of ties in to part of Gretchen's project, where she opts to fake being energetic about something in order to actually end up being more energetic. Kind of a "fake it 'til you make it" concept. Well, on a broader sense, I'll give it a whirl with just being happy and smiling. I tend to smile a lot when I actually am happy, but not so much with little everyday interactions. If I see a neighbor walking into the condo, I'll wave and say hi, but it probably doesn't come off as friendly as it would if it came with a smile.
This will be a little tricky, since I often hate my smile, and cannot force it for the life of me. Ever since I was a kid, there were the other kids who could smile on cue and have perfect school pictures, and there was me, who ended up with some sort of a grimace, a frightening bared-teeth look, or the years I opted not to try at all, and got what looked like a mug shot. It really doesn't come naturally to me, unless I truly am happy. But how do you get better at something? Practice. And as dumb as it might sound, I'm going to practice smiling.
Not all the time, mind you. I don't want to walk around with a constant grin on my face - that makes people start to whisper about you behind your back. But I'll try to be more conscious of it, and throw it in when I'm chatting with people, so they don't think I'm always so serious. So if you happen to bump into me and I wave and say hello with a bizarre expression on my face, don't run away. I'm trying to smile! :)
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