Yes, I’m still plugging away at the Happiness Project.
I’m now more than half way toward the end goal of 100 days of consciously making note of happy moments. I missed one or two days along the way, unable to find anything overtly happy to document. I refused to allow meh to be accepted as an alternative to yay. This meant that for some days, I really had nothing to show for my efforts except for what seemed to me to be a gaping hole in my Instagram photo board. That whole honesty thing is a tricky one.
One thing that is rapidly becoming clear now that the Vietnam Plan is solidifying in the anticipatory sector of my brain is that I can more easily find thrills and excitement just thinking about going somewhere new than I can in the place where I actually am. I already have a mental list of all the blog posts and series I could write about and it’s still months away. Familiarity and ease actually make it much trickier to pinpoint notable moments of happiness and specific things worth writing about.
I remember this about Shanghai after a few years, when everything felt pretty much under control and understood and familiar. Without the constant contrast of things that baffled or surprised me, I had a tendency to just let days and weeks and months slip by in a fug of okayness. I often only felt really energized and buoyant when flung into brand new places, whether they be regular quick jaunts up to Jinan or Zhengzhou or Liuzhou for work, or longer journeys to Myanmar or Morocco for a month or so, twice a year during university breaks.
One of the reasons why I started the Mop Blog in the middle of my Shanghai half-decade was so I was forced to keep actively observing and finding interesting, curious, exciting new scenarios in what could too easily have become just a blurry, familiar backdrop.
This inability (or rather, perhaps, unwillingness) to equate familiarity and routine with happiness means, if I ever want to stop compulsively uprooting myself (and by extension, husband and child), I need to rewire my brain a bit.
And this is where this 100 day Happiness Project comes in. Days can’t just slip by when you have to actively focus on identifying exceptional moments.
I’m currently on Day 69 or so, but I’ll keep this round-up a bit more compact and slightly less long-winded.
Let’s backtrack a few weeks…
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