Day 16: The Happiness Project

Welcome to the halfway point of my slightly haphazard happiness project.

The blog version anyway.

The official one is 100 days but oh, god, you really don’t want 100 consecutive days of me blathering away about 1. food or 2. young Thwack and his variable independence or 3. my intermittently frustrated wanderlust. I’ll probably do the remaining 70 days on Instagram because, damn it, I’m not one to give up once I’ve started a challenge- which is why I’m super picky about which challenges I choose to accept.

Since I’m doing this challenge concurrently with this one, I’m simultaneously attempting to find real moments of happiness and giving up cake and cheese.

I’m not sure if one cancels out the other.

Today’s photo has absolutely nothing to do with what made me happy because, well, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. There were moments throughout the day when I felt reasonably content, in spite of yet another night of stunning sleeplessness, but I didn’t have my phone at hand to snap a photo or I did but my fingers were covered in a Moroccan spice rub or I had something to tend to on the stove.

Documenting happiness is proving to be more of a challenge than expected, mostly as it’s a lot more ephemeral than it is neatly tangible and definable.

For example, today I made really lovely grilled, spicy turkey fillets and a big pot of surprisingly amazing Ethiopian cabbage-n-carrots (to which I predictably added extra hot chilies and a diced length of some sort of Eastern European dense cured sausage) with Radio 6 on and Thwack on his mat on the floor, mostly not howling.

That was lovely.

I think that might have been happy. I was still dazed from the slightly manic nocturnal state of unrest so it was hard to differentiate mood from physical state.

And then there was the sunny, breezy afternoon walk back from dropping off the little shared red car on the other side of the park, pushing a somnolent Thwack along uneven pavements through a neighbourhood that looks like the 19th century never finished, all brick and old skool street lamps and tiny lanes accessible only on foot.

I liked that a lot.

The tricky thing with this happiness project, however, is honestly identifying moments of happiness. There have been times when I was doing something and I thought, this should be making me happy; I should take a picture of it. Because it seemed like something that makes people happy. But when I stopped to actually think about it, my real feelings were closer to meh than to woo-hoo.

It would make for some great photos but a dishonest project.

And there are days when I honestly don’t know what to post. Not because I was actively unhappy, but rather because I couldn’t identify any one particular thing that stood out, something that I hadn’t already noted before- I can’t just go on and on about cooking, can I? I’m not going to bore you with baby pictures because that would be insane.

I’m hoping the next 14 posts won’t be all frittatas and fencing.

The whole Happiness Project collection of posts can be found here.