Hello there my friends, and welcome back. I hope you had a lovely weekend, and are going into this new week with some energy and enthusiasm!
Weekend Recap: I fully embraced my nerdy side, and I spent the weekend at a Supernatural convention. I took Friday off so that I could sit in a large room and listen to some of my favorite actors answer ridiculous questions. I also got to have a picture taken with Kim Rhodes and Briana Buckmaster – who are pretty incredible women – and also with Jim Beaver – who I’ve been “chasing” for many years. I’ve really only gone to three total SPN conventions in my life, and he was always scheduled to go, but then couldn’t. So that was the last photo opportunity that I really wanted to complete my collection. Now, it is complete.
Today I wanted to talk about a mini-experiment I did in August. I had the realization that I was, in fact, a pessimist. Most of my life, up until maybe nine or ten years ago, I was a very persistent optimist. I saw the bright side of things, and I believed people were generally good.
And then I moved to Denver.
City people are not my people, and concrete and buildings and cars do not make me happy. I like small towns, and being friends with neighbors, and trees and parks and quiet. So moving to one of the biggest cities in the US (#19, if you were curious), had a hard impact on my soul.
I mutated into an optimistic pessimist.
I want to believe in the good in people. I want to give folks the benefit of the doubt. I want to hold on to hope that we, as the human species, can be better and do better. But I don’t. I want to see the sunny side, but in the end, I am a pessimist. I plan for the worst, but hope for the best. My plans all have backup plans for when something inevitably happens.
So I decided everyday in August, I would find something for which I was thankful. Big things, little things, weird things, just something. Life is hard, for everyone, in different ways – but all in all, I have a great life. I have a wonderful family and amazing friends. I have an awesome house, my pets are adorable and bring me joy, and I have money enough to keep food in our fridge. I had no reason to be as negative and mopey as I was being.
So I pointedly searched for things everyday that made me happy, or brought a smile to my face, or gave me a moment of realization at how lucky and blessed I actually was. Everything from a flower I saw on a walk, to my fur babies, to taking a bath, to kind words people said to me. But the point is I was looking for it.
Good things happen a lot, but we generally don’t notice because there isn’t a stimulus to catch your attention. There’s no threat, no fear, nothing to make your brain take notice. So you have to actually train your brain to notice the good things. You have to make an effort to see the normal things in your life that make you happy, because there are a lot, but we overlook them because that’s how our brains are wired.
At first, finding things to be thankful for felt like work, and it started as out-of-the-norm things, like a call with my best friend or a surprise gift. But as I continued, it got easier to find tiny joys. Little knick-knacks in my office that remind me of my passed mother-in-law, a set of fox ears I was given for Christmas last year that I found, a comment in my WIP from my critique group, my journal. Little things that are actually consistent in my life, but I wasn’t noticing. Then it became as easy as noticing the sun was shining and the sky was blue – and that actually made me happy.
But what I loved the most actually, were all the people who went on the journey with me. Everyday I asked, “What brought you joy today?” And people shared it with me, their daily joys. Their photos, stories, jokes, or whatever it might have been that day. From big things to small things, people were sharing their joy, and that made me even happier. That amplified my own small joys, and words cannot express how helpful that was to me.
So, dear friends, I would highly recommend trying this. Take a month, thirty days, and purposefully look for things that bring you joy. Share them, bring people with you on the journey, train your brain to recognize all the wonderful things in your life. It can only do good things for your heart and soul. And if you do it, tag me! I’ll join you on the journey.
