2014: HAPPY NEW YEAR – Blog 1

 

 

On New Year’s Eve 2013 I woke to not feeling in a particularly good place, a place of gloomy pessimism, if not actual depression, and as I sat with this place keeping it company I recognised its origins: my father.

 The best way to try describe my father’s approach to life is to compare him to Victor Meldrew, the cantankerous old grouch, and anti-hero of the classic BBC British sitcom, One Foot in the Grave, look like a man of positivity and optimism!

 



Then a gut feeling led me to surf the net and I came across Positive Psychology, something I did know about but had never really explored, but on Tuesday 31^st December if felt just right to explore more now. That this is what this place of gloom and pessimism was signalling to me that this what I needed to create an antidote to the part inside that could be so like my father and Victor Meldrew.

That morning I bought a Kindle version of  the book written by Miriam Akhtar called “Positive Psychology for Overcoming Depression” and could start reading straight away – one of the gifts of technology! And out of this reading I had an “Aha” moment – we all say to each other as once Christmas is over and the last few days of December are upon us “Happy New Year” – but how many of us actually stop and think about what can we do to make the next year “Happy”? So I decided to dedicate 2014 to actively work on creating and cultivating happiness in my life.

And I decided to experiment by using a beautiful little diary I had been given for

 

Christmas by a good friend as a “feel-good” journal and that each night before I went to sleep I would write down at least three things that had made me feel good, feel happiness, joy, delight that I had encountered and experienced during the day that was just drawing to a close. I saw this process as akin to finding the pearls of positivity out of the grit of daily life.

I have found this already to be an amazing experiment and I first really became aware of how much doing this had changed my perception of my life when in the middle of March a good friend said to me how glad she was that it had finally stopped raining and we were actually having a dry day in 2014. When she said this I noticed inside me a sense of surprise as I had not experienced our weather as having been like this for this year.

So I sat and pondered and recalled we had indeed had a lot of rain – so much that the area in which I live in the UK, Worcestershire, made the international news due to the very severe flooding. What I realised was it was not that I had forgotten all the rain and flooding, rather I had not given it a lot of space inside me.

What I had been doing was every time it had been even only a partially sunny day I had written this down in my feelgood diary and in so doing, what I now realised was how, this had shifted my perception of the weather of 2014 into a much more positive place because I had been merely focusing on and cultivating the good weather experiences.

 



 As Norman Vincent Peale, the progenitor of positive thinking, said:

 CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS AND YOU CHANGE YOUR WORLD.....