Day 28: The Happiness Project
The 30 day aspect of this whole happiness thing is nearly done. I won’t subject you to the whole 100 days that the original challenge called for. Theirs was just photos, anyway. I was the masochist who decided to turn it into a blog post fest.
I started this just as my parents were leaving and I was in a really different headspace. Neither good nor bad, just different. One of the things that this past month of carefully noting the bits that resonate has done has been to help me to better differentiate between the things that are genuinely positive and appreciated and the things that I think should be positive and appreciated but which actually just left me feeling cold or neutral.
The other thing that has slowly evolved over the past few weeks has been something that I already knew and which I finally had to concretely acknowledge last winter in Bali, when everything went kablooie: sometimes you have to stop trying to fix something that is fundamentally broken. Sometimes you just can’t keep trying to put a positive spin on a choice that wasn’t the right one to have made. All that square peg/round hole stuff is true when it comes to recognizing that your gut feelings are probably right and that you have to stop giving that uncooperative square peg dirty, frustrated looks all the time.
As you may have noted if you read Day 26, changes are afoot and they are radically different from the changes we had worked so hard to bring about last autumn, thinking that they were what we needed. On a lot of levels, after a lot of effort and patience and frustration, we slowly recognized that maybe it just wasn’t the right time for this.
Cryptic, I know, but we’re still working on the next steps.
Let’s just say, I have a feeling I’ll be back in form in a few months.
Day 28’s happiness comes partly from this recognition and partly from the fact that it was finally warm and sunny enough to lie out on the grass in our back garden on a big throw that I had carted all the way from Shanghai, with a half naked Thwacky, giving his poor baby bottom a nice dose of vitamin D.
So… Leicester not for you? Quelle surprise.
We knew Leicester would be a challenge on many levels (and planned to stay only 1-2 years tops) but came here really for Michael to reacquaint with his enormous family and to pass the baby around, rather than for any other reason. What we didn’t expect was how challenging the whole freaking country would be…
It might be a bussman’s holiday, I will have one when I have finished a chink of my new job, I start induction as a caregiver of senior care which is a gloomy thought. Great blog though!
Oooooh I did senior care for a few years in my 20s- not as gloomy as feared but don’t let the dementia affect your own brain patterns! It happens, especially after long days surrounded by not-quite-right folk. Mind you, teaching wasn’t so different…