Savor the moment

Yesterday I was mid late-night blogpost when I got fed up with my train of thought and erased it all. In case you were wondering, I was writing about the bummers of being single and the struggle to keep a positive attitute about it, but mostly in specific situations. As I was writing, it occurred to me that I don't know anyone who's in a relationship who blogs.

That's probably still true.

But regardless, I've had a dramatic switch in focus since last night, and I'll continue to blog away about it.

I'm currently reading (or taking a break from reading, while the thought is still in my head) an article for my Comm class about how to be happy. It's not that I'm struggling with happiness and deseperate to find a way to pull myself out of a rut, because I'm not...but nevertheless I was pleasantly intrigued by the contents of the article. It reads, "research now suggests that 40 percent of our happiness might stem from intentional activities in which we choose to engage". My first thought was, "I bet one of those activities isn't blogging about one's unhappiness..." The article goes on to say, "...in trying to explain which activities might actually help us cultivate happiness, positive psychology keeps returning to the same concept: gratitude."

The rest of the article follows the story of a woman trying to apply the theory to her own life, first by keeping a list of all the sings she was grateful for, no matter how insignificant; second, by recording all the good moments in her day; and third, by savoring the moment whenever possible.

That last one was my favorite and I think it's so pertinent to how we develop a state of mind on a daily basis, because when we savor the moment, we're not only taking in something that might have otherwise slipped by, but we're killing two birds with one stone and being grateful for a really good thing that's right in front of our eyes.

Ever crawl your exhausted self into bed and lay there for a moment, reveling in just how good it feels? I definitely had one of those moments this morning. I savored it.

Ever spend so much time in one place and with certain people and never realize how special it is until life throws you somewhere else, and all you want to do is go back and relive a few of those moments? I'm currently sitting in the computer lab at my school and I took a moment to stop and appreciate, and I was overwhelmed by the blessing of being here. I know that 5 years from now I would give anything just to be able to sit and multi-task here, and I'll never really get this time back.

Ever go outside and do homework on a sunny day, but never really get time to chill for a minute, watch the sun flicker between the leaves, smell the smell of nature, etc, etc.?

You get the idea. Try it, it's nice.