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| Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash |
“This minute decide to never again beg anyone for the love, respect, and attention you should be showing yourself. Today, look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I love you, and from now on I’m going to prove it!’ When you practice self-love and self-care, you give yourself the opportunity to be happy. And when you are happy, you become a better friend, a better lover, a better family member, and a better you.”
—Marc and Angel Chernoff,
Getting Back to Happy
Though like all registered American Quarter Horses, Tank
turned another year older on Jan. 1, his actual foal date is Feb. 18. For reference, a 27-year-old horse is roughly equivalent to a
78-year-old human. (And to answer the question nearly everyone asks, horses live an average of 25-30 years.)
Tank is finally starting to show his age, though he’s still
in remarkably good shape for an old guy. I’m currently working with his vet and
farrier on a non-life-threatening lameness issue that is keeping me from riding
him. Even so, we have had to turn him out alone in a smaller enclosure because
he was goofing with the younger horses and galloping around like a maniac
because of the cooler weather. He still gets plenty of grooming, carrots, and
treats, and I’m going to look into alternate activities to do with him while he’s
temporarily sidelined, and for when riding is permanently off the table. Maybe
I can teach him to paint!
At the end of this month, we will have been together for 18
years. I’d wanted a horse since childhood, and when my husband and I were
contemplating relocating to Florida (his home state) from California (mine), he
sweetened the deal by promising that I could have a horse if we made the move. I
don’t think either of us really thought that would be possible, but I filed
that promise away for many years until time and finances made it possible to
consider. Tank has been one of the best investments of time and money I’ve made
in my life.
Tank has been a friend and partner through
adventures, he’s taught me lessons in patience, sacrifice, kindness and
courage. During our rides, he’s helped me dig deep to conquer fear. I’ve learned
to put aside my own comfort to give him what he needs when he’s sick or injured
(twice a day visits to the barn to flush wounds or medicate eyes during the height
of summer heat and humidity…). I’ve cried into his mane, and allowed the sound
of him munching hay soothe the sore spots in my heart. We’ve gone on
trail rides, explored different types of terrain and jumps at Fannin Hill Farm,
and hit the water together at a lake and the beach. I’ve spent hours just
hanging out with him while he grazes. And as a bonus, I’ve met some of my
closest friends at the two barns where he has lived. I’ve written about our
experiences many times here on Catching Happiness. A few highlights:
I wrote about the process of finding him for the AQHA’s member magazine:
I’ve “learned to speak horse” and hosted horse birthday parties.
I’ve imagined what it would be like “If My Horse Had an Instagram Account.”
I’ve learned so many life lessons along the way, like this one.
And I’ve shared some of our more mundane experiences in “Look Mom, No Cavities!” and “A Little Off the Top and Sides and…Belly.”
Here are a few photos from our time together. Happy birthday, Tank—thank you for all the simple pleasures and everyday adventures!
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| Fannin Hill |
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| Our first day together |
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| Beach boy |
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| Experimenting with riding without a bridle |
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| Ho ho horse |
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| In his prime, with a shining summer coat |
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| The two of us just hanging out |
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| Summer 2021 |
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| Tank and Paloma, the first of his lady friends at our new barn |
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| Contemplating life |
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| Snoozing |
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| On the trail |
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| Happy New Year 2022 |
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| Photo by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash |
The Internet can be a mixed blessing. It can entertain us, teach us, and keep us connected with our friends and family—and it can deal our self-esteem some crushing blows and contribute to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Today let’s concentrate on how it can brighten up our lives! Since many of us have been struggling either with winter blahs or various other challenges related to staying positive, I thought I’d devote a Link Love post to some links I’ve found uplifting and encouraging lately. Be sure to share any of your discoveries in the comments below!
Modern Mrs. Darcy’s annual “10 Things Saving My Life Right Now” post is always a comfort. Be sure to read the comments, too.
I’ve listened to this piece several times since I read this
story. It’s so beautiful and calming, and what an amazing accomplishment.
100 Ways to Improve Your Life Without Really Trying. The simpler the better! I do #20 several times a week, working on #57, and #78 is genius!
“The One Habit to Break to Find More Joy.” Ingrid Fetell Lee
always has something thought-provoking to say.
Stories like this one help me remember that there are kind
people in the world, and that small gestures can make big differences.
The “How Not to Be Grumpy” episode of the Soul + Wit podcast
came at the perfect time. I picked up some suggestions to help me cope with the
days that I feel less than *happy*.
More music. Stunning cover of Stairway to Heaven performed by Heart:
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| The inspiration for the title of this blog post |
Well, kind of. I missed my normal post day last week because I experienced a depressive episode. I’d been working on a post about mindset, focus, and expectations, and I just wasn’t able to finish and post it as I planned on Friday.
I don’t tell you this to ask for sympathy or make excuses. While
I don’t want to dwell on them, I feel it’s important for us to be open about
mental health struggles. I want Catching Happiness to be a place of uplift,
peace, and inspiration. I want to contribute to the “happy” in the world, to
offer encouragement, a positive attitude, and support to you, my dear readers
and friends. I know we’re all facing our own challenges and troubles, and I believe we need to be real about how happy or unhappy we are, rather
than ignore or gloss over what feels hard.
Today is a better day. I’m leaning on the habits that (mostly) hold me together.
Today is not as hard as Friday was. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe, I’ll even finish that blog post about focus, mindset, and expectations!
Note: Jenny Lawson, “The Bloggess,” writes extremely
well about the condition of depression, and I especially enjoyed “Is Today Hard?” (post contains adult language).
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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.
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!
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| Started with a plain canning jar and a small notebook |
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| Took the ribbon out of the cat’s mouth |
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| The finished product |
Containing your happiness
Of course, you don’t need to buy or make anything special to
record the happy little things that happen. You can keep a journal of happy,
either handwritten or on your computer. You can take a photo of what brings you
joy and create a folder to keep the pictures in. You can look at your happy
little things every week, every month, once a year, or never. This is YOUR
happiness, and YOUR happiness jar should you decide to actually use a jar! There aren’t any rules! (
The point of the Happiness Jar is to pay attention to and record good things. We all have them, even in the depths of crisis and despair. Maybe this will help us hold onto them a little tighter.
How do you record happy little things? Please share in the
comments below. And do let me know if you decide to do a happiness jar of your
own!
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| 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:
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.)
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.
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.
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