The Happy Book within the School of Perpetual Celebration
The Happy Book is a tool designed to enroll you in the School of Perpetual Celebration.
A great many of us humans spend an inordinate amount of time looking forward to the next ‘big thing’. What I mean when I say this is that we are constantly anticipating the gigantic things which serve as benchmarks in our lives: the next raise, the marriage, the baby, the vacation you’ve been planning for years, etc. etc.. What frequently happens with this mentality is not so much that these things do not happen, it’s that when they do happen, it’s only enough for a very short length of time.. after which we are inevitably looking forward AGAIN to the next ‘big thing’..
The Happy Book is a tool designed to counter this habit. This habit many of us humans have of not paying attention. As we busy ourselves with the pursuit of the ethereal ‘next big thing’ it never enters our minds to pay attention to all of the myriad steps that bring us to those places to begin with. When you celebrate the small things, the seemingly insignificant things, you instill yourself with a new set of habits: observing and recognizing the wonderful and delightful in your everyday and celebrating those things as you recognize them. Nothing prepares you more for receiving large things than by practicing receiving and appreciating smaller ones.
Hence, the Happy Book.
so.. you get a book.. it can be a small journal, a place in your laptop; now days you could just as easily do it on your smartphone-no matter.. You create a place, and you make sure it’s accessible to you as you go about your daily. You record every and ANYthing that happens that brings even a little bit of a smile to your face or that you recognize as helping you out that day: say you didn’t have to stop for a single red light, or somebody called you just after you were thinking about them, or you found money in your pocket you’d forgotten you had.. ANYthing that impacted you even a little in a positive way.
What you don’t write about in this particular journal is any of the big stuff.. It’s too easy to keep track of that. If you’d like, you can keep a separate journal for all the big stuff. But one thing you will find is that when you begin paying attention to the smaller things, you’ll begin to realize at a fundamental level, just how beautiful your life is on a regular basis; just how many things happen that are so full of serendipity and ‘coincidence’ that perhaps
you just might start to see your life as magical.. hmmm..
just a thought but even if you never end up there, at the very least you’ll get a lot more thrill out of your daily than you did before and you’ll be that much more set up when the ‘big things’ happen. Concomitantly, you will have begun to create your life as a place wherein there is always something which you can take joy from.. there is unerringly a something that can brighten your mood without you having to go very far afield in search of it- and y0u will be several steps closer to establishing a different ‘norm’ for yourself as you go through your life.