"The more I spend time soaking in the organic joy of life, the less time I have to spend fishing for happiness."
I told Brandon a few days ago that on President's Day, I wanted to have, "the perfect day." Was it a ploy to get him to take me to breakfast and help me install my new shower head? Maybe. Regardless, we marked the day on the calendar as the Perfect Day. (Move over, George Washington.)
What constitutes a perfect day? Ours consisted of breakfast at a restaurant we've been wanting to try, listening to records, reading, hanging out with Maverick, knocking out a few projects, and finishing off with a late Valentine's Day dinner.
Pretty run-of-the-mill federal holiday stuff. Nothing special.
But days like today create the most joy. The days where a bunch of little moments collide to create this relaxed, easy-going, happy feeling. The day isn't over-managed, over-busy, or commercialized. It's just satisfying.
God didn't create joy to be complicated.
At my ripe old age of 25, I've become cynical of social media, and the content I get fed from sophisticated algorithms is telling of such. I gravitate toward content that depicts simple aspects of life like cooking or exploring a national park and tend to weed out the TikTok dances and clothes haul unboxings. "Influencers" (holy crap I'm using quotation marks... I am old) push this materialistic mindset on their viewers, convincing them that they need clothes, technology, trips to Bora Bora, etc. to find joy. They sure have convinced me of that in the past. But I think I've cracked the code on happiness, and it's not as complicated as I once thought. God surrounds us with pockets of bliss through the most ordinary parts of our lives. Here's a non-exhaustive list of what I'm talking about:
the smell of coffee and bacon in the morning
the fulfilling tiredness you feel after a hard day of work
the warmth of a clean room
the quick, easy conversation with a stranger
the way a sunset on the beach feels
That's the good stuff, and it should should be celebrated. Thank God we don't have to blow our life's savings to taste contentment: Our everyday lives are surrounded by it.
My Perfect Day was perfectly mundane. But it was perfectly perfect.
Kommentare