Effortlessly Happy

I decided that I would put myself through a bit of an experiment.

Nothing crazy, I'm not into shock therapy or anything, but I was interested in testing some general theories.

I had gotten to a point where I was waking up every morning, dragging myself out of bed, forcing myself to take a shower and then bribing myself to get in the car to go to work. My life, as I saw it, was nothing more than the drudgery of day-to-day. There was no excitement, there was no spark, there was nothing that made my eyes widen with wonderment or glee.

Then, one ordinary evening as I sat at my desk lamenting about the electric bill being due while I simultaneously tried to come up with something semi-original for dinner, I glanced over at my nephew who was busily engaged in excavating a 12 car pile up in the middle of the family room floor.

"Don't worry," he said in a deepened voice, "I'll save you!"

He worked frantically to sort the heap of cars in the middle of the floor and lined them up neatly in a row, only to reenact the mock crash scene all over again.

"Now that kid," I thought to myself, "has one serious imagination."

My four year old nephew didn't have a single thing in his life that even came close to resembling drudgery. Every moment, every action, every event was something new and exciting. It was his simple outlook on life that allowed his imagination to run wild, one minute creating mock crash scenes in the family room, the next minute saving whales from the depths of the bathtub. His mind ran free with every possibility he could dream up.

Most of all, as I watched him playing in the middle of the floor, I realized that he was happy.

Effortlessly happy.

That's when my new theory was born.

If we have X amount of energy per day, and we spend Y amount being negative and miserable then we are left with Z amount to be imaginative.

So then I wondered....

If we have X amount of energy per day, and we spend Y amount being positive and optimistic then what would the difference be for the Z amount?

Now in my original theory - the equation looked exactly the same: X-Y=Z

But after putting the theory into actual practice, what I've discovered is that the equation changes completely.

By changing my outlook from being negative and miserable to being positive and optimistic I don't subtract away from my allotted amount of energy in a day - I increase it - which makes my new equation look like this: X+Y=Z

I won't go so far as to say that it's been easy. My old habits still push me in the direction of being negative and cynical about the simplest of things, but I'm hopeful that with a little practice I'll be able to find that it's just as easy to be positive.

It's all just a part of my process to re-invent myself into a person who is happy.

Effortlessly happy.