My earliest memory is of my Mum telling her friends that I was born with a smile on my face, that I rarely slept as a baby and that in fact whenever she or my Dad put their head in my room they would find me awake and smiling. I heard her say this over and over and like most things that are persistently repeated, I eventually believed it to be true.
Is it any surprise that I grew into a happy adult, with sleep challenges?
Happiness hasn’t always had a front row seat in my life. It ran out on me when my husband and my Mum passed away. But after the pain and the grief it bounced right back because by then it had become my natural mood. I’m mostly a cheerful Charlie and I claim absolutely no credit for it at all. It’s all my Mum’s doing. She created a belief of happiness in me and then it became a habit. She might have been telling all and sundry what a miserable little toad I was, or what a dimwit I seemed to be and no doubt I would have accepted that just as readily. As kids we’re like little pieces of blotting paper, soaking it all up, good, bad or indifferent. Thanks Mum.
Lives contain health challenges, heartache, struggles, frustration, and some uncertainty, so we’ll probably never be one hundred percent happy. But every life has happy moments and everyone can look for the happy moments in their day and appreciate them when they arrive and begin to create the habit of finding that happy moment every single day. Keeping notes of daily happy moments makes for fascinating reading.
My friend Jennie decided to spend a whole week saying I am happy over and over as many times as she remembered. She said it whilst driving the car, doing the dishes, the laundry, in the shower, in the gym…in fact everywhere she could. She claimed that more things to be happy about appeared in her world, her energy level rose, and her reactions to events that would have had her in a real tizzy the previous week were calmer. She felt…well happier.
A piece of trivia about happy people:
According to a Gallup poll Utah is the happiest State in the Union. 
Not ready for a move, why not try noticing your happy moments, or choosing happy thoughts, because as Dale Carnegie used to say:
“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you’re doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It’s what you think about.”
Or in some cases, is it just being programmed by your Mum?
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1 Comment
Very pretty layout and so you! I really enjoyed the “autumn in Florida piece – the photos are really lovely. By the way we do have that saying, just substitute “sailor” for shepard and you have the American version. Red Sky in morning, sailor take warning; Red sky at night, Sailor’s delight!
We’ll all learn the lingo in the UK just reading your blog, “boosy boots”, whatever that is!