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December 2004
Success Harmony Newsletter

I don't know how you feel about the Christmas holidays. You may love them. You may hate them. You may not celebrate them at all. You may prepare for them all year or you may wish you could crawl into a hole and hibernate until the craziness passes again. Christmas time may represent a beautiful time for a wonderful family get-together. It may mean a painful reminder of loved ones departed. It may be the loneliest time of the year or the most fulfilling time of the year.

Whatever Christmas time means to you, would it be different if you knew you didn't have too many left? In fact, even as a child, we will be lucky if we see Christmas time 100 times in our life. Whatever your age is now, how many of these times will you see? 50? 30? 10? Either way, is it not a shame to do anything else other than to enjoy the time? Even when Aunt Hilda tells her embarrassing story of getting picked up for getting drunk and dancing on the tables the night of her 25th wedding anniversary, can you enjoy that Auntie Hilda is alive and well enough to tell the story yet again? Can you see the humor in the in-laws fighting over who gets to host the Christmas dinner this year? Can you appreciate the one family outcast who introduces politics and religion over dinner only to watch the rest of the family polarize over who is right and wrong?

Is it not too bad that most of us spend our entire childhood wishing we were older so that we could be adults and make our own decisions, yet when we get to adulthood we wish we could go back and really enjoy the time we had without all the responsibility that comes with being an adult?

Assuming we sleep 8 hours a night, we will sleep through one third of our lifetimes. We will work through another third or more of that lifetime. We will spend another large percentage of our lives eating, driving, reaching for a cup of coffee to get us to another day of work, working up a sweat in the gym so that we can have the abs that nobody really cares about all that much, staying late at the office so that we can have the flashy car that most people won't even notice. After we subtract all the times that we are living for someone else or to support a life we "should have" according to someone else's standards, what does that really leave us with? A few minutes each day? Is that a way to live? Would we live it differently if we stopped to think more often and realized that we don't really have the luxury to throw so much of it away every single day of our lives?

Whether it's Christmas time, or if it's just a plain unmemorable January 15th of some even less memorable year, is there a way to make it more memorable? Even if the actions of your days don't make it into the Guiness Book of World Records, they should make it into the book of memories that lives in your heart, not into the book that has "Glad It's Over" on its cover.

How do we do that? Well, there's this cliché that says, "If there's a situation you don't like, either change the situation or change your attitude about the situation". I think that this kind of sums it up. First of all, take stock of what you do spend your time on and how you feel about that time. Track your days for two weeks. Every fifteen minutes, jot down what you were doing and how you felt about it. At the end of the two weeks, add up the time into categories in two different ways. One, categorize by the type of activity. Two, categorize by how you felt about the activity. You can have just three levels of enjoyment (liked, disliked, neutral) or you can have a scale of 10. Whatever works for you and whatever is manageable to easily look at when you're done. If you're the Excel spreadsheet type of a person, you can even do a pie chart on your results. Whatever strikes your fancy. Whichever presentation makes it easier for you to see where you are currently spending your time and gives you some insights about what you want to keep and what you want to change.

Chances are that there will be at least some times in your days that will be eating up your time in ways you never realized. Then is the time for choices. Which of your time wasters can you and/or are willing to do something about? Which of those are the necessary evil of being alive? For example, all of us need to spend some time sleeping and eating. Resenting those activities doesn't do much good. Neither does skimping on them. The consequences are generally much worse than taking the time to do them right in the first place. With such "necessary evil" activities, how can you make them more enjoyable? A new set of comfortable linens to sleep on? Upgrade your food budget by 10% while increasing your enjoyment of it two-fold? Eat healthier? Allow yourself one big slab of cheesecake every week so that you don't feel like a slave to your diet?

There will be some activities on your little pie chart that are outright unnecessary to anything in your life. No survival needs are met through them, nor are you getting satisfaction through them. It could be that dreaded weekly dinner at the in-laws where everyone argues. It could be the hours spent in front of the TV. It could be the hours spent sitting in the car in traffic, mindlessly listening to the radio in the background. How could you either eliminate or reduce these activities? Could you reduce the in-law dinner to once a month without creating a family crisis? Could you be more vigilant with going through the TV program to only watch programs that you really care about rather than allowing the remote to take over your evenings? Could you learn a new language or get educated in a new way by listening to CDs in your car while you are waiting in traffic?

Finally, there will be some "big" activities that either are taking you where you want to go, or not. Are you spending your days at work doing what a puts a smile on your face and in your pocketbook? Are you happy coming home to your family or would you rather stay at work or go out with your buddies so that you don't have to face what is at home? Can you imagine what it's like to spend your day jazzed about your work, and then coming home to a loving spouse and family? If these "big" things aren't right in your life, what can you change about them?

No lives are ever 100% perfect. There are degrees of happiness and, in my view, the happiest life is a combination of incredible gratitude for all that already is there, perfect or not, along with a dose of curiosity of how to make things even better. It isn't about striving for perfection and never being happy until that elusive end is achieved. Then, happiness would never happen. However, it isn't about saying "all's good" and being done with that forever. It is about realizing that today can be the most perfect today that there ever will be, even if tomorrow can have something that feels even better than it did today. To me, that is what happiness means and, this Christmas season, I wish you that kind of happiness to be with you however you celebrate the season, and for all the days that follow…

Happy ordinary and extraordinary days, sunshine and smiles,

Pavla

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi

"The poor man is not he who is without a cent, but he who without a dream."
Harry Kemp

"Be mindful of how you approach time. Watching the clock is not the same as watching the sun rise."
Sophia Bedford-Pierce