Project Happy Chi

The new year is upon us and...OMIGOD! I'm writing in my blog! I'm actually posting something! Exactly how many months has it been?

Okay, let's not count.

I will be honest: 2009 was not a great year for me. I really struggled through many months of it because, well, post-traumatic stress disorder sucks. The nightmares, insomnia, anxiety attacks, and free-floating fear is draining. Getting control of the symptoms was very tricky and required a lot of experimentation over many months. It was hard for me to believe that anyone wanted to hear what was going on with me during that time and so I avoided my blog. Because even that made me anxious. And after a while, when I felt better enough to write, I found that I didn't know what to say.

Have you ever had that happened? For whatever reason, you fall out of touch with someone and you want to reconnect, only, you can't figure out how to start the conversation again. How do you explain how you weren't in touch? Maybe they are annoyed with you and don't want to hear from you. Is it naive to just want to pick up where you left off, or do you owe an apology?

We all know that the real way to reconnect is by starting the conversation on something, anything. But if you mull it over for too long, it becomes bigger and more complicated than it needs to be, and finally, it just apears impossibly hard. Which is silly, of course. I mean, in my case, it's just a my blog we're talking about. But it does feel like a relationship to me, and I do hate to let people down.

I missed you. Even those who never comment, you too.

So, let's dive into my topic: Project Happy Chi. Hear's the dealio: for 2010, Kathy and I have decided that we want to do whatever it takes to make our lives...happier. To generate happy energy. And so we have named this Project Happy Chi.

Sounds simplistic, huh? But really, I'm quite excited about it. There are so many angles we can approach this from, so we want to choose a whole bunch of them. After all, this is a theme, and I like that, because it gives us a lot of flexibility. Creating happy energy can include how we communicate, how our home is designed (feng shu and organization), what activities we choose to focus our free time upon, and even what we choose to eat. We want to evaluate our choices agains the question: does this improve on my happiness, or does it detract?

What's funny is that from years of writing poetry and creating art, I know that artistically, happiness is probably the most maligned emotion. Happy poems are often considered amateurish. Happy art is folksy or simplistic. Only happy song and dance seem to get a reprieve, though songs are still "pop" if they are happy and it's the heart-wreching dances that generate all the discussion. If you believe the critics, pain and anguish is much more interesting and sophisticated than happiness could ever be.

But...I don't want more pain or anguish. I have enough of it to work with, and while I often find insight within my past experiences and these insights drive my work, I'm not looking to invite more of it into my life. It's like the difference between the art I bind into books versus what I hang on my wall. I find it personally fullfilling and freeing to document my emotional journey visually, yet it's not what I want to look at every day. Why? Because that is where I have been. On a daily basis, I want to see, hear, and feel the cues that are about where I am going. What I am becoming. The transformational energy that brews inside me. Truth is, art that's full of pain is what gets talked about and exhibited, but people tend not to buy it for a reason. They don't want more pain!

We want to make this project more deliberate than hanging a happy painting on the wall, of course. But I think you get a sense of the spirit behind it. We are old enough to know that other people don't bring us happiness, there are many things we cannot control in life, and we cannot even change everything about ourselves. But we can do little things that lighten our journey through life. For the things we can control, let's deliberately focus on what brings delight, connection, and meaning.

I don't call this a resolution because, really, I hate to fail. I am more than a little Type A. This is why Project Happy Chi is a theme. It's a process where there is no failing. There is just re-orienting, asking ourselves again and again, "Is this the course we want to remain on?"

We'll have to see how this goes. In the meantime, I'm interested in finding out how you are choosing to make your life lighter and happier. What works for you? What are you ready to try now?

And I'm glad to be back. Remind me to tell you the latest IKEA story sometime. ;-)

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