Expectations

Can You “KonMari” Happiness?

February 25, 2019

Photo by Ryan Christodoulou on Unsplash

Marie Kondo is having a moment. With two books on organization (or “tidying”), The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy, under her belt, and a Netflix Original series, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, she seems to be everywhere right now. She even attended the 2019 Oscars! 

I’ve read Kondo's books and gleaned some helpful ideas, and I was charmed by her respectful gentleness in the Netflix series. If you've managed not to hear about Kondo’s way of organizing, called the “KonMari Method,” one of its hallmarks is that as you work through each category of clutter, you hold every individual item to see if it “sparks joy” in you. If it does, it stays. If not, it goes—but not before you take a moment to thank it for its service.

I like the thoughtfulness of her approach, as well as its emphasis on joy. It's freed me to release items I’ve kept “just in case,” as well as to hang on to things which bring me joy for no apparent reason, all without guilt. Sometimes I need to probe a little deeper. Maybe my cell phone charger doesn’t in and of itself spark joy, for example, but I need it to keep my cell phone working. My cell phone brings me joy by helping me stay in touch with people I care about, taking pictures, and all its various useful tasks.

I began to wonder, could we adapt KonMari to other areas of life. For instance, in order to be happier, which areas of our lives should we “tidy up”?

Here's what I came up with:

Relationships. Which people in our lives spark joy? Are we making time to be with those people? Do we have any relationships that drag us down rather than spark joy? Can we spend less time with the people who drain us, or avoid them altogether? We need to look for ways to cherish and deepen our most precious relationships, because they are the single most important component of a happy life.

Attitudes and expectations. Our attitudes and expectations have a huge influence on how happy we are. Replacing negative thoughts and expectations with positive ones will, well, spark joy! Instead of feeling overwhelmed, we can be happy and grateful that we have full lives, for example. It may sound a bit falsely cheerful, but it’s true that how we think determines so much of our happiness.

Home environment. The most obvious category, of course, but one that does make a difference to our happiness. We can manipulate our physical environment to make our lives happier. We may not want or need to do a full KonMari organization, but there may be an area of our home that doesn’t feel joyful. Recently I’ve been working on my home office, which used to be a comfortable haven where I could get creative, but has recently become where stacks of paper and books go to die. 

Just as the point of organizing is not just to have a neater home, the point of “tidying up” our attitudes and relationships is to open us to a better quality of life, where what we have, and what we think spark joy.

Guess I’d better get back to my office…

What sparks joy for you?

Everyday adventure

Summer Rerun: Charting Unknown Territory

August 22, 2016

Nikolay Okhitin, PhotoXpress.com 
Welcome to summer reruns! About once a month, I’ll be sharing a post from the archives. I hope you enjoy this one, from 2011.

In my reading this morning, I stumbled on a phrase that captured my imagination: terra incognita.

Terra incognita means “unknown territory.” It’s a term cartographers used to use to describe unmapped or undocumented regions. According to urban legend, these areas were sometimes labelled “Here be dragons,” though only one map survives with this wording (“Hic svnt dracones”). However, Roman and medieval cartographers did mark maps with the phrase, “Hic svnt leones,” which means “Here are lions.” (Wikipedia)

Why do we expect scary things (dragons, lions) when we face the unknown? Why not expect unicorns, or daisies? It seems to be human nature to expect the worst when facing the unknown, and to some extent, that’s what keeps explorers alive: expecting and preparing for the worst.

To my knowledge, there are no more unknown and unmapped physical lands, though terra incognita is sometimes used metaphorically to describe an unexplored subject or field of research. However, there is still the unknown land, the terra incognita, of the future. None of us knows what the future holds, though plenty of dire predictions can be found as close as your nearest screen—TV or computer.

Since we will all navigate the unknown land of the future, what tools should we use? The same ones we use in navigating our known world: our good sense, our friends and family, our spiritual principles, our ability to learn, and a positive outlook that we can handle whatever lions life throws at us. While we explore, we should be on the lookout for the positive, not just the negative, because I’m more and more convinced we see what we expect to see.

While we certainly should prepare for negative eventualities in our lives, why not also prepare for positive ones? Save money not just for a calamity, but for a celebration once the promotion comes through, the report card contains straight As, or the grandchild is born.

Truly, every new day is terra incognita. We don’t know what it will bring. Whatever it holds for us—daisy or dragon, unicorn or lion—if we cling to our tools of navigation, we’ll come through safely.

Beauty

Five Ways to Cultivate Pronoia

July 13, 2015

Um…cultivate what?

I just came across the term pronoia recently. Have you heard it before? According to Rob Brezsny’s book Pronoia: The Antidote for Paranoia, “It’s the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It’s a mode of training your senses and intellect so you’re able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.” Wikipedia has this to add: “A person experiencing pronoia feels that the world around them conspires to do them good.”

We often don’t have much control over what happens to us, but we do have the ability to choose how we see the world. If we find what we look for, and we get what we expect, why not expect the best?

Here are five ways to cultivate pronoia:

As corny and simple as it seems, count your blessings. Health, family, friends, home, comfort in all its forms—your most basic blessings are the most precious…and often the most overlooked.

Choose your input carefully. With what kind of images, stories, and news do you feed your mind? The frightening, sad, ugly, and negative? Or the beautiful, uplifting, joyful, and positive?

On a related note, actively search for beauty. Look for it in nature, music, art, architecture, food, literature, and so on. What do you find beautiful and uplifting? (For more about the importance of beauty in our daily lives, click here.)

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” If you want the world to be a nicer place, do something nice—for yourself and for someone else. In this way, you’re an active part of the conspiracy to do good.

Let go of judgment when seemingly bad things happen. Life may conspire to give you what you need, when you need it, but it doesn’t always give you what you want, when you want it. (And sometimes it gives you what you definitely don’t want.) You can waste a lot of time bemoaning circumstances you don’t like, or you can listen to some widsom from Captain Jack Sparrow: “The problem is not the problem; the problem is your attitude about the problem.”

Author Susan Jeffers said, “We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic, and positive equals unrealistic.” But we don’t have to continue to believe that or live it. Let’s cultivate pronoia instead.

Activities

We'll Never Have Yard of the Month

May 20, 2013

Not yard of the month.

Our subdivision just started a new program—“Yard of the Month.” There’s a sign posted right at the entrance with the address of the winning house. When I saw the sign, I realized immediately that we’ll never have “Yard of the Month.” Not because we have an ugly yard, or a neglected yard—what we have is a yard that doesn’t fit the image of what a subdivision’s “Yard of the Month” should look like. We’ve left a good portion of our front yard in its natural state, except for grass required by the subdivision in the portion of our yard between the sidewalk and the street. This is our choice and our preference. I’m completely fine with never winning “Yard of the Month.” There’s something very freeing about not buying into someone else’s ideal.

This got me thinking about other areas of life where I might be buying into other people’s expectations: what I do (and don’t do) with my horse, how clean (or dirty) my house is, and, most certainly, what I do (and don’t do) as a parent. This last is particularly on my mind as we get ready to send Nick out into the world. It didn’t take us long to realize our son is not a fits-the-mold kind of kid. (But he was “Student of the Month” one time—in first grade!) We’ve had to frequently reexamine our expectations and choices to see if we were doing what was best for him or just what everyone else was doing.

It’s a good practice to take inventory of all our activities from time to time, asking ourselves why we do what we do. Because we really want to, or because someone else thinks we should? It’s all too easy to buy into someone else’s idea of happiness/fun/worth, without stopping to consider what we actually think ourselves.

I’m still learning this lesson—as we probably all are. How about you? Is there anything you’ve stopped doing after evaluating why you were doing it? Anything you’ve started doing just because you want to?

Expectations

Well, What Did You Expect?

March 05, 2012

Saturday afternoon, my husband and I were in a minor fender bender. We weren’t hurt, the damage to our car is minimal, and the other driver’s insurance should cover the repair. While we waited for the police to arrive, my thoughts took the following turn: “Great. Here’s one more poopy thing happening to me this year. 2012 is shaping up just as poorly as 2011. What is going to happen next?”

I sat in my car, unhurt, watching the breeze blow Spanish moss on the oak trees while white fluffy clouds scudded across a blue sky, thinking poor, pitiful me thoughts. That was bad enough, but what bothered me most was the mindset I seem to have fallen into: being on the lookout for catastrophe. I don’t deny that bad things do happen, but this expecting catastrophe mindset is draining happiness out of my life, making me cringe and cower as I face each day, as if waiting for blows to fall. That’s not how I want to live!

A friend and I have an ongoing joke about “fresh hells”—as in “What fresh hell is this?”  At least, it started as a joke, a way to lighten up when something bad happened, as bad things do from time to time. We use the image and the phrase to help us laugh when we want to cry, and as a shorthand for some unwanted and un-looked for experiences. I don’t want necessarily to give up this joke, but maybe it’s time to add a positive version? Fresh heaven, perhaps?

Really, I’m grateful for my life, and the many beautiful things in it. Perhaps it’s time to go back to making lists of things I’m grateful for and things that make me happy. I believe we mostly find what we’re looking for, what we expect, and if my expectations are that things will be happy and good, they will be more likely to end up that way.

I’m expecting better things of 2012. How about you? How have your expectations affected your life?

Looking for a smile? You'll find one...

Everyday adventures

Charting Unknown Territory

March 25, 2011

Nikolay Okhitin, PhotoXpress.com
In my reading this morning, I stumbled on a phrase that captured my imagination: terra incognita.

Terra incognita means “unknown territory.” It’s a term cartographers used to use to describe unmapped or undocumented regions. According to urban legend, these areas were sometimes labelled “Here be dragons,” though only one map survives with this wording (“Hic svnt dracones”). However, Roman and medieval cartographers did mark maps with the phrase, “Hic svnt leones,” which means “Here are lions.” (Wikipedia)

Why do we expect scary things (dragons, lions) when we face the unknown? Why not expect unicorns, or daisies? It seems to be human nature to expect the worst when facing the unknown, and to some extent, that’s what keeps explorers alive: expecting and preparing for the worst.

To my knowledge, there are no more unknown and unmapped physical lands, though terra incognita is sometimes used metaphorically to describe an unexplored subject or field of research. However, there is still the unknown land, the terra incognita, of the future. None of us knows what the future holds, though plenty of dire predictions can be found as close as your nearest screen—TV or computer.

Since we will all navigate the unknown land of the future, what tools should we use? The same ones we use in navigating our known world: our good sense, our friends and family, our spiritual principles, our ability to learn, and a positive outlook that we can handle whatever lions life throws at us. While we explore, we should be on the lookout for the positive, not just the negative, because I’m more and more convinced we see what we expect to see.

While we certainly should prepare for negative eventualities in our lives, why not also prepare for positive ones? Save money not just for a calamity, but for a celebration once the promotion comes through, the report card contains straight As, or the grandchild is born.

Truly, every new day is terra incognita. We don’t know what it will bring. Whatever it holds for us—daisy or dragon, unicorn or lion—if we cling to our tools of navigation, we’ll come through safely.