So I finally finished my Magic Test of Seven. What I thought of as a seven-day exercise took nearly three months to finish. Quite unbelievable. But sometimes we just need to take that extra time and allow ourselves to get sidetracked. It reminds me of a graph I did not use in my seven graphs post but one that is quite telling as well.
You can substitute the word success with many other words. My favorite one would be “Happiness”. There is a real beauty in just “getting completely off track” now and then. Not even knowing what you’re exactly searching for, or even better not searching for anything at all. I think that is what it comes down to. Happiness is not a search. It’s also not a decision (if it would only be that simple . . .). It’s a feeling. It’s a long chain of happy moments and happy thoughts, and if you line them all up, this feeling arises. Suddenly it’s there. It’s a realization more so than anything else.
Take note of the importance of the “lining them all up”. I believe this is the crucial piece. We all have happy moments. Even people, who have near to nothing, have intense happy moments. We sometimes forget to cherish them. We just let them pass by, we hardly notice them. The more wealthy we become, the harder it seems to capture these little moments. We take so many things for granted. In this fast-paced world, we need to learn to pause and to take a bit of time to reflect.
I clearly wasn’t the first to realize this. The blog http://365grateful.com/ from Hailey Bartholomew created a worldwide movement. Apps, hashtags, journals, all there to help you keep track of happy moments. But how you do it in the end is irrelevant.
What matters is that you take note of those happy moments and create a little space in your heart to carry around your personal collection. I even believe that if we do that, our heart – over time – gets a little bigger.
