Three things that made me happy today:

• Meeting the young couple who came to look at my rental cottage. She's a law student, he's a carpenter/musician, and they both just struck me as very pleasant and likeable. I hope they want to rent the cottage, especially because I'm getting a slightly funny vibe from the other couple who is interested.
  
• The dress I wore. It's a silky (crepe?) salmon-colored tunic I bought on sale at Anthropologie maybe a year ago but for some reason haven't brought out much. I found it in the back of the closet this morning and thought, why not? I wore it with an Ethiopian cross on a black cord around my neck. For some reason, the ensemble made me happy.
  
• The prospect of going to the beach tomorrow. Duh.

Just 3 things...

I've just completed a week-long challenge on Facebook that involved posting every day about three 'good things.'  Although sometimes I wrote about things I was grateful for, I generally posted about things that made me happy -- simple moments during the day that brought me joy. A subtle difference, gratitude and happiness, but an important one, I think. I found it easier, more fun, and maybe a little less sanctimonious, to focus on happiness.

The whole experience was a tad uncomfortable for me, introvert that I am -- just a bit too public. But I did it anyway and I'm glad I did. As I expected and hoped, it has helped me create a habit I'd like to strengthen: not just reflecting daily on the experiences, people, sights, smells, tastes, ideas, etc. that give me joy, but also experiencing them more fully, being more present with them as they happen. I took up the challenge partly because I wanted to carve those neural pathways a little deeper. 

There's another change I didn't expect, though, and that I'm kind of excited about. Having committed publicly to post three good/happy/gratitude-inducing things a day, I found that I was more inclined not only to seek them out and to be more aware of them as they occurred but also to create postable moments or experiences if they weren't forthcoming -- that is, to make my own happiness. 

One day, for example, I wasn't feeling great, or especially happy. I was, in fact, pretty blue. I dragged through the day, and those golden moments were eluding me. By evening, I'd identified a couple, but I was having a hard time feeling grateful or positive about anything. Nothing inspired. 

But I wanted to be able to complete the challenge; I was unwilling to fail. 

So I decided to make something post-worthy happen. I realized (as I have many times before but frequently forget) that I had the power to turn my mood around and look for and even create the good experience or perception I needed to meet the FB quota. 

It was already almost dark, but I decided to put on my shoes and go for a walk, to get a little exercise and to move toward something I knew would bring me pleasure -- a raid on the fig tree at the elementary school down the road. Just because I wanted to be true to my word, I forced myself out of the house, and I had a lovely walk on a beautiful summer evening. And I came home with a bag full of plump figs, sticky fingers, and a happy experience  to post on my timeline. Not to mention a photo, a great bedtime snack and the powerful reminder that I can create my own happiness at any time.

All of which is introduction to a declaration, and another, slightly less public commitment that I want to make tonight. I want to keep this up, this habit of looking for and acknowledging the good things that fill my life every day. But rather than share my moments of happiness and gratitude on Facebook (which still makes me a little queasy), I am going to do it on this blog. 

Chances are no one but me will ever read it. That's fine. I want to do it mainly for myself, as a form of personal discipline. Discipline intended to keep solidifying the new habit, and also for writing. 

Today, though, I'm going to keep it simple and not elaborate on the shining moments or what they taught me. Very simply, today's three things:

• the satisfaction that comes with editorial tidying-up of a document I've been working on a long time
• hearing my visionary (and generous) friend Karen's exciting ideas for my home renovation project
• sitting in on a songwriter's circle sketching with the women in my "reportage" drawing class.

A blog? Really?

I've tried for a long time to ignore blogs -- not individual blogs, the whole phenomenon. So it seems fairly absurd that I am even considering starting one now. 

My potential personal relationship to this new-ish format -- channel? what exactly is it? -- doesn’t differ at all from how I've thought of the old ones. Since my first urges to write, I have deeply questioned whether I have anything to say that is original or in any way interesting, meaningful or useful to anyone else. That, as I like to imagine, I can write pretty well when I want to doesn't seem relevant to that question.

But maybe my friend Colie has it right. "We are all so human," she says in her blog.  And something about sharing both the every-day and the extraordinary challenges and the joys inherent to being human is useful, even if only for validation.  If only for connection.
Sometimes I forget, but at least right now, I am under no illusion that my experience is any better or any worse -- any different -- than anyone else’s. Or that I am any better or worse.  And maybe that is part of why we write and why we read -- to feel less alone in the journey. 

I could use feeling less alone. And if I can make someone else feel less alone, that would be worth the effort and the potential humiliation of putting myself out there.

Defeating the wire grass

I am certainly not the first to make this analogy, but sometimes, I think, it really is all about defeating the wire grass.

Being healthy and happy requires constant tending of the weeds. Like wire grass, ego habits -- the kleshas, in Buddhist terminology -- creep into and threaten to overtake our psyches, inhibiting the growth and flow of life energy and awareness. If we let them, these negative mind forms (am I really saying that?) overpower and obscure our experience of the splendor of creation, and we forget that it’s there. 

Or maybe I should just speak for myself. I forget that it’s there.

I don’t really know what I’m doing in the garden. I pull out things that look like they shouldn’t be there and hope I’m not mistaking seedlings of vegetables I planted for weeds.  Over time I think I’ll learn to distinguish between them better. And I surely could supplement that essential experience (practice) with research, and thus benefit from the experiences of others who have gone before me.

The same principles are true outside the garden, in life.