I’m not really going to count rainy days. Or maybe I actually am, since the forecast only calls for one day of rain.
Nevertheless, it is raining.
Our scheduled carpet cleaners arrived late Wednesday, and we still have LOTS to finish with our painting project, so I skipped Taekwondo Wednesday night. Skipping Taekwondo did not make me happy Wednesday night, but finishing our house will provide months of happiness!
That’s part of the counter-intuitiveness of Happiness. You often have to do things that don’t make you happy (or give up things that do make you happy) in the short term in order to gain a more profound long-term happiness. That’s the goal of the Independently Happy project: long-term, deeply-rooted, warm, glowing, unbreakable happiness.
The happiness I derive from living in a clean, clutter-free home will provide more enduring happiness than one night of Taekwondo. Granted, when I complete my long-term goals of getting my black belt and of becoming a Taekwondo instructor will also significantly contribute to my long-term happiness and well-being, the house is an immediate concern. You’ve got to keep the proverbial weeds out of the yard! This, of course, invokes the topic of balance, which I will cover later.
Just as this experiment with my eating style is certainly not contributing to any current or short-term happiness, the strength, knowledge and awareness I’m developing will make a much greater contribution to my long-term happiness.
Speaking of food. I didn’t feel all that great Wednesday, another reason I skipped Taekwondo.
My alarm app quit on me in the middle of the night and did not sound off, so I did not get up early enough for a run Thursday morning. That was aggravating, but it happens. I had planned to get a run in Thursday night, but was working on the house and lost track of time. I also lost all my energy, thank you Experiment! I was pretty moody and irritable, something that carried over into this (Friday) morning. All in the name of science!
I stopped at Starbucks today to try a soy latte. I ordered soy, but wish I had ensured that it was dairy-free. It either had dairy in it, and my stomach is already lost its tolerance for dairy, or my stomach doesn’t like soy milk. Either way, it’s not that bad, and the act, flavor and warmth of a pretty decent coffee has made me feel a little better today. I am–as of this writing–significantly less irritable. We’ll just see how long that last when I unleash the spell-checker on this mess!
Tomorrow, I’ll talk a little more about the house, SHOULD go to Taekwondo and I’ll bring up a subject that has also been weighing on me a couple years: books, CDs and DVDs.
Spell-checker was good to me. Irritability level: Yellow.