Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

“Hope isn’t the same thing as happiness. You don’t need to be happy to be hopeful. You need instead to accept the unknowability of the future, and that there are versions of that future that could be better than the current one. Hope, in its simplest form, is the acceptance of possibility.

“The acceptance that if we are suddenly lost in a forest, there will be a way through.”

—Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

Quick, tell me three happy things that happened this week. They can be small or large, they just have to be something you noticed and took pleasure in.

Surprisingly hard, isn’t it? It’s so much easier to remember the trauma, the disasters and catastrophes, than it is to remember the quiet little moments that actually make up most of our day-to-day lives. I wanted to change that for 2022, and one of my solutions is the Happiness Jar.

Happy little things

I can’t take credit for the Happiness Jar. The original concept, which I’ve seen attributed to author Elizabeth Gilbert, is to jot down one thing you’re happy about or grateful for every day and store it in a jar. At the end of the year, read all the good things that happened to you over the past 12 months.

I’m tweaking it a little. Instead of one thing every day, which seems overwhelming to me (and not simpler), I’m going with a minimum of one per week, with the option to put in more if I so choose. At the very least, I’ll have 52 slips of paper, and that’s a lot of happy little things! Since Jan. 1, there was one (rough) week where I had just one good thing to put in. But last week, I already had two by Wednesday. 

Focusing on recording the happy little things has made me start to look for things to write down, and to schedule things to look forward to. I think this is going to be the gentle nudge I needed to start planning a few more simple pleasures and everyday adventures.

Another great thing about this practice is the happy little things can be really little…and they can (and should) be things that you find happy/uplifting/funny/awesome/fill-in-the-blank. This is a personal practice, intended for your eyes only.

As Liz Gilbert wrote, “In fact, my happiest moment each day is usually just a glance of something sweet and small, an unexpected flush of emotion, a bit of sun on my face, a pleasant encounter on the sidewalk, a cool glass of water at just the right instant, the cat-like contentment after a nap, a glimpse of a bird just out of the corner of my eye, a recognition of some tiny lovely thing.”

I thought you might enjoy seeing this little project come together, so here are a few photos. You'll see I had a lot of “help.” I was lucky enough to have a bunch of cute papercrafts given to me by a friend that I could use to decorate my jar.  And to jot down my happy little things, I’m using pages from a mini notebook someone else gave me. So much happiness and affection in this one small package!

Started with a plain canning jar and a small notebook

Took the ribbon out of the cat’s mouth

The finished product

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

How have the first two weeks of the new year been treating you?

I’m finally taking a breath after a whirlwind last couple of weeks of 2021, another year I’m not sorry to put behind me. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks recovering (I’m so tired…you?) and regrouping. (Read: digging out my office which has become, once again, a Pit of Despair.)

The beginning of a new year is a natural place to think about goals and changes you want to make. But this year, instead of planning a whole year’s worth of goals, or diving head first into the deep end, I’m taking a gentler approach overall. For example:

Word of the year

Remember my word of the year (WOTY), dare, from last year? Probably not, because after that first optimistic post, I don’t think I revisited it on the blog even once. And not much more often in private. Too many varied and disrupting events took place in 2021, and dare just didn’t fit well with how the year played out. In this instance, choosing a word of the year was kind of like when health experts try to match the annual flu vaccine with the flu strains expected to be circulating…and fail!

In retrospect, a better WOTY for 2021 would have been “survive.”

So anyway, as 2021 wound down, a word kept reappearing in my consciousness, and as I usually do when that happens, I’ve taken it as my WOTY for 2022:

Simpler.

Not shiny or glamorous, but fitting, in that the past two years have made me hunker down and reevaluate my life in unexpected ways. I’m looking forward to seeing how simpler influences how the year unfolds. Two things that come to mind immediately are the way I cook (my menu planning and cooking need a revamp that makes them simpler) and what I concentrate on in my writing. I’ve been chasing too many different types of writing projects and I’ve managed both to lose the joy of writing as well as dilute my focus and skill level. I’m sure more will come to my attention as the year goes on.

(Two of my online friends have also chosen words of the year. Read their posts here and here.)

Goal setting/yearly planning

I’m very good at complicating things, overscheduling, and being wound too tightly. Rushing, rushing, rushing. Fitting more in when I should take more time to do fewer things. (Another way in which simpler may help.)

I came across this sentence in something I read (forgive me, I can’t remember where I found it), and this sums up what I want for 2022:

“I want a year of ease and serendipity and settling into the spaces of my life in a way that feels organic instead of molded to fit arbitrary goals I set for myself.”

I’m slowing way down. Being a lot more deliberate. There are a few things on my “I’d like to accomplish” list for 2022. I’m using Gretchen Rubin’s “22 for 22” framework, but I only have about 10 things listed so far. 

What I’m not doing

I’m not doing any reading challenges. I’m not going on a diet. I’m not “making big plans,” at least not yet. 

And speaking of plans, I just finished reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman (Amazon, Bookshop, no affiliation), which is not about time management in the traditional way at all. This passage resonated:

“…planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, ‘a plan is just a thought.’ We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.”

Almost none of my plans over the past two years have come to fruition. I’m disappointed, but at the same time, simply grateful to be alive and relatively unscathed. I’m not even going to try to guess what 2022 holds, but I am going to stay optimistic and open. To continue to embrace simple pleasures and everyday adventures—and to share any happy discoveries with you.

Do you have any special plans for 2022? What is your word of the year?

For more easy, beginning-of-the-year inspiration, check out these links:

The Soul + Wit podcast, “Less Hustle, More Happiness.” 

The Action for Happiness Happier January calendar.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Well, folks, we made it. 2021 is winding down. I hope you have a happy, peaceful, and safe New Year’s Eve. Here are a few words of wisdom to see the old year out and welcome in the new:

“No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.”

—Buddha

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.”

—T.S. Eliot

“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”

—William E. Vaughan

“What the new year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the new year.”

—Vern McClellan

 See you in 2022!

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

“When you drive past other people’s houses, all the windows look brightly lit and all the faces look happy. But of course that happens when anybody drives past the houses of the Holiday Impaired, too; almost everybody looks good from far away when surrounded by a warm light within a frame of darkness. Let’s face it: we—the best and the worst of us—all tango through all these times as well as we can manage. Some years will be better than others, but all such days deserve recognition and, yes, celebration.

 “Why? Because, despite the fact that the holiday is not going to be perfect, not going to be like something out of a magazine (unless you count the official publication of the World Wrestling federation), and not going to be everything you hoped, it is a chance to make what might be just another day a memorable time. All days are gifts and should be celebrated; the holidays give us a chance to do it together.”

—Gina Barreca, “The Holiday Impaired,” collected in Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful

Wishing everyone a happy holiday season, and merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

Photo by Kolby Milton on Unsplash

“I am willing to allow more joy into my life.”

—Monday yoga class affirmation.

It’s easy to feel joy when everything is going the way you want it to. But what about when life blows a big fat raspberry in your face? How can you seek joy when you’re going through tough times, and feeling grief, frustration, or anger?

While the holiday season does bring many simple pleasures (Holiday lights! Peppermint chip shakes!), it also ushers in longer to-do lists and the weight of a year-end reckoning. It can be a heavy time of year, especially if you’ve suffered losses or have troublesome issues on your mind (and who doesn’t?!). It can feel anything but joyful. And for many people, the cold, dark months of winter can be an added strain on their mental health.

It’s these rough times when we need to dig deeper to find practices that help us to feel joy.* Fortunately, psychologists and other professionals who study joy and happiness have some help for us. (While joy and happiness aren’t precisely the same thing, for the purposes of this blog post, I’m lumping them together.)

 Here are a few tips I’ve found useful lately:

It’s OK to feel joy, even when times are tough. Even when happy things are happening to and around me, sometimes I don’t let them register because so many people are suffering right now. I feel guilty, like I’m being insensitive. As Ingrid Fetell Lee, author of Joyful (see my post about the book here), points out “…feeling joy is different than pretending nothing’s wrong. And in [a] world where anxiety is a fixture, not an anomaly, joy is essential to our survival.” (Her entire post, “Can You Still Find Joy When It Feels Like the World Is Ending?” is worth a read.)

Let your environment help you feel more joyful. I also recently listened to a podcast interview with Ingrid Fetell Lee, and she reminded me how many ways we can bring joy into our surroundings. Two of her suggestions that I’ve embraced already include:

Having something green in my office (helps to reset concentration and attention). I have a lot of green in my home office, including green furniture and artificial plants (my cat eats real ones).

Keeping something silly or surprising in my car. Cars have a lot of little individual compartments that close up, and, according to Lee, that creates the potential for surprise, one of the factors that adds joy to our lives. I have a tiny origami dragon in one of the little compartments on my dash that makes me smile every time I see it. This could be a fun thing to do for someone else, too—hide a little fun surprise in their car.   

“Practice” positive emotions. According to psychologist and neuroscience researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett, our brains use our past experiences to make sense of and create the present. “By practicing particular emotions, you can ‘rewire,’ your brain…. So when you start to feel a negative emotion, such as sadness or frustration, you can more easily swap that negative feeling for a positive one, such as awe or gratitude.” For example, maybe the next time you’re stuck in traffic, instead of feeling frustrated, pause and feel grateful for the fact that you have a vehicle that runs and can take you where you need to go.

This may seem a bit “Pollyanna-ish,” I know, and I’m not saying we should ignore or stifle negative emotions completely. I do think we as a society have allowed ourselves to forget how good we have it and we’d be happier if we turned our focus more often to all that is good in our lives.

Actively seek experiences which bring about positive emotions. What actions or experiences bring you joy? How often do you deliberately perform those actions or have those experiences? Especially when times are hard, we can’t wait around for happiness and joy to “just happen.” We have to pursue them. As Natalie Dattilo, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, reminds us in “5 Happiness-Boosting Things to Do Before the End of the Year, According to a Positive Psychologist,” “Happiness doesn’t just happen… Routine and planned activation of the pleasure and reward centers of the brain is required to feel good and to preserve our ability to feel good in the future.”

These experiences don’t have to be complicated or expensive, either. The example I liked the best from this article, was the “awe walk”—a walk where you deliberately look for the unexpected and delightful—allowing yourself to experience the beauty and intricacy around you. (Read Dattilo’s five end-of-the-year happiness tips here. And for more ways to seek delight, visit NPR’s Joy Generator.) 

If you’re feeling little joy right now, I understand. And when you’re suffering, it seems impossible to do the things that might make you feel better. I hope one or more of these small things will help.

What little things can you do to welcome joy into your life?

Photo by Boris Dunand on Unsplash

“Order your gifts early,” the headlines trumpet! If you don’t, you might not be able to give the perfect gift and you’ll disappoint your family and friends! Those supply chain shortages we’ve been hearing about mean fewer things are available, and they’re taking longer to get here.

Though it’s definitely frustrating to find a gift you think someone will love, only to realize you can’t get your hands on it, it’s really nothing more than an inconvenience. No one is going to be seriously affected if he doesn’t get [insert holiday gift here]. I’m more concerned about these things our society is showing critical shortages of:

• Patience
• Kindness
• Empathy
• Consideration
• Forgiveness
• Love
• Joy
• Gratitude

We’re all tired. We’re all fighting our own battles. I don’t think I’m the only one who finds her feelings running very close to the surface. It doesn’t take much to tip me into anger, frustration, fear, or grief, so I’m trying harder to hold onto patience and kindness, to keep my mouth shut when I want to “correct” someone, and to be grateful for my precious life.

Supply chain issues or no, we can all give the gift of letting that car merge into traffic ahead of us. Being patient with the overwhelmed cashier. Forgiving our partners for hurting our feelings.

We can do without the most popular gadget of the season. What we can’t do without is caring about each other.

That headline sounds a lot more exciting than the updates I have for you warrant, but I do, indeed, have updates.

2021 Gratitude Challenge

Though I didn’t post every day, I participated in the 2021 Gratitude Challenge throughout November. I decided to go easy on myself and post only when I felt inspired, though I read and thought about all the prompts. I wound up posting 18 times. Three of my favorites: 

Day 4 Laughter

Last week my friends and I attended opening night of the first show of our Broadway series in Tampa. Tootsie made me laugh out loud, and oh how I've missed that! It's been almost two years since we've been able to see a show, and how sweet it was. I'm grateful not only for the laughter, but for all the wonderful performances of the artists. We're so happy you're back!

Wishing for a world where kindness is the norm, and every day is World Kindness Day. Grateful for the kindness that exists even now, when being kind is sometimes taken advantage of. Kindness isn't weakness.

Day 24 Art

"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."--Pablo Picasso. I don't know about you, but my soul needs a shower! I've missed visiting art museums, and I'm looking forward to going again soon. I'm grateful for the escape and inspiration art provides, especially paintings like these my husband and I saw at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine.

(To see all my Gratitude Challenge posts on Instagram, click here.) 

My fall fun list

I did great with my modest fall fun list, and since a couple of these were out of my control, I’m calling this a win. Completed items in red.

• Resume attending touring Broadway productions at the Straz in Tampa. First up: Tootsie at the end of October. 
• Go see Dune in a theater with my husband. (Watched at home on HBO Max instead, and glad we did.)
• Decorate my house for fall.
• Do my current jigsaw puzzle. It’s not fall-themed, but I’d like to put it together before buying any more puzzles.
• Buy some fall potted flowers—mums or?
• Walk at a local park or recreation area with my husband and dog.
• Eat dinner at Bern’s Steakhouse with another couple. We’ve had to cancel this meal twice because of COVID. (Unfortunately, this got cancelled again.) 
• Choose a new set of inserts for my planner for 2022. 
• Plant some cool season veggies and herbs. Hope springs eternal, despite some pitiful efforts in the past. Planted lettuce spinach, and jalapenos from seed. (The spinach and lettuce sprouted, but the jalapenos did not. I bought a seedling from a big box store…and then my cat ate most of its leaves, and the dog ate some of the spinach before we realized what she was doing. The struggle is real.)
• Read and/or write outside…once we get a real cold front. (Didn’t happen yet, but technically I have until December 21 before fall becomes winter and it’s likely that I will work outside before then…)
• And yes, drink at least one pumpkin spice latte.

Why I share updates

I don’t really think you’re waiting on the edges of your seats to see if I complete the Gratitude Challenge or drink a pumpkin spice latte. The point of creating and sharing fun lists and other challenge-type info is to encourage you to think about what YOU would find fun and challenging, with the bonus that it keeps me more accountable if I’ve shared my plans publicly. I try to write about both my successes and failures so that maybe someone will benefit from my experiences (today’s tip: keep young vegetable seedlings away from pets). These lists also help me think about how I spend my time. I tend to get caught up in the day-to-day rush and don’t plan or allow for the very simple pleasures and everyday adventures that bring me joy.

What else is on your mind, Kathy?

Why, I’m glad you asked!

Dear Reader, I’m thinking about the holidays. How they can be fun without being overwhelming. What will make them feel festive and special? I foresee a holiday fun list in the future! There may also be a year-end review of some kind. What should I include? Favorite books? Word of the year update? If you have suggestions, please share in the comments below.

What’s on your mind these days? Holiday fun? Year-end reviews? Planning for a new year? Any updates you would like to share? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Photo by Hanna Balan on Unsplash

I’ve been more stressed and anxious than usual the last month or so, and with the holiday season approaching… All the yoga, barn time, and bubble baths will not be equal to the task. Even though the Internet can be a source of stress, it can also be a source of helpful and healing ideas. Here are a few links I’ve loved recently:

During this busy time of year, who couldn’t use “5 Resilience Tips for the Frazzled”?

Read Ingrid Fetell Lee’s “A Guide to Joyful Gift-Giving” before you choose your holiday gifts. I love finding presents that seem “perfect” for people, but that’s a lot of pressure to put on myself, and there’s no guarantee the receiver will love the gift the way I hope they will. So I’m scaling back my expectations, and remembering that “the real reason we give a gift is to show we care about someone.” 

I’ll be trying some of Courtney Carver’s “25 Simple Ways to Take Care of Yourself Over the Holidays,” especially #2 and (of course) #15.

Loved the pretty pictures in Tammy Strobel’s (Rowdy Kittens) Delight Diary. I just finished reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and am pondering how I can do something similar. 

Even though this is a year old, “51 Ways to Destress, Calm Down, and Feel Less Lonely Right Now” still has TONS of great ideas.

I’m a fan of hygge, even in sultry Florida. Check out these “Simple Ways to Add Hygge to Your Winter Routine.” 

And if you’re just looking for something far removed from social media and the craziness of the world we live in, check out The Public Domain Review. I just discovered it and haven’t yet had the chance to explore it much. It looks interesting, even if some of the topics go straight over my head. 

Let’s finish this off with a video featuring relaxing nature sounds:

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

Does it feel like the world has become a darker, scarier place? It does to me.

In a recent conversation with a friend, we discussed, jokingly (wishfully?), going back to a time when we were not as intimately aware of the many problems facing mankind, whether it was because we were younger and more innocent, absorbed in our own lives, or simply because we did not have 24/7 news from the farthest flung reaches of the earth thrust into our faces at every turn. We know that’s not possible, or even desirable, but…

It’s hard to be happy when there is so much misery all around.