How To Be Happy: The Next Chapter

Though it’s easy to scoff at the horribly cliché title of this blog post, I’m hoping that if my life were in book form, the next few months would prove to be the ultimate page-turner. As a literature fiend, a truly sickening book metaphor seems to be the easiest way to shout out to the world that I’m moving to Australia. Cue the dramatic ‘duh, duh, duhhhhh’.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post that I chose not to publish. The basic tone of such post was I'm soo bored I hate my life woe is meeeee and nobody’s got time to listen to a measly excuse of a blogger waffling on about her sorrows when our lives are often hard enough to manage on their own. I was down in the dumps, unsatisfied, a grumpy grizzly, if you will. After a hefty few months of wallowing, I decided that my slightly unhinged and flat life needed a re-service. After all, do things really need to be 100% broken to warrant the need to be fixed?

In an attempt to bid farewell to the sulk, I culled everything that no longer made me happy because, let's cut to the chase here, it is completely okay to focus on your own happiness. You are allowed to travel and live where you want, spend your money on nice things or sometimes tell friends you just want a night in. To think about your own happiness doesn’t make you selfish, it encourages you to take control of your emotions. It is futile to push on believing that things will fix themselves if you just sit back and watch life pass by.

How to tell fear to do one

Life can be a pretty intimidating and daunting ride.

In our twenties, it’s unlikely we have any sense of direction, we are all pretty broke and we probably spend the majority of our free time crying 'WHY ME WHYYY' having necked about ten tequilas the night before. Ok, so the latter might just be me, but when life’s path isn’t fully laid out for us, anxiety can take over.

Where will we be in five years time? Are we ever going to pay off the debt we owe? Or find that one person who makes nothing else really matter to save us growing old with cats? (Crazy cat lady is my middle name, hi.) Yes, life can be pretty scary and there are many experiences that lie ahead that are bound to make our hearts skip a beat or stomachs turn twice over. But I’m certain that it’s the things that scare us the most, which are the most empowering once overcome.

In my opinion, if you’re not shitting yourself, you’re not experience something new.

The Importance of Being Mindful

So it’s the first day of a fresh new month. The sun is shining more than it’s raining, when we finish work at 5.30pm it’s still light outside and we are one month closer to summer. One might say we have quite a lot to be happy about. However, the reality is that no matter how bloody beautiful it is outside or how swimmingly well our lives are going, the twenty-first century human being has a habit of either dwelling on the past, or worrying about the future. The present ‘now’ doesn’t become a sincerely meaningful thing until tomorrow comes and it’s transformed into the past.

As humans, we are very very bad at appreciating the present moment. Actually, not even appreciating it but merely living it. Everything boils down to yesterday or tomorrow. But what about right now? Like, right this second? How are you feeling? The past has been and gone and you’re never going to create a time-machine, so really, the most important moments of our lives are the ones that we’re drifting straight through whilst our busy minds are set to autopilot.