Here comes the holidays with Thanksgiving just days away! Most of us have a love/hate relationship with the holidays. We love the food, and the togetherness we share with friends and family. But we also hate the way we look and feel after eating so much food and arguing with families over topics worth nothing important.
We talk about how the holidays are a joyous time for seeing our families with giving and sharing at the heart of this time of year. However, most of what we see are small transactions of joy in the form of food, tiny bits of togetherness (when we can pry our eyeballs from our tech screens) and a few gifts sprinkled in. Compound all of this with two full months of holiday buildup, it leaves most people feeling a bit let down and depressed after New Years.
The real truth is that our happiness is a choice that we each make every second of every day. We choose our happiness by how we respond to our life but most importantly how we decide to define what is going on around us. Is your life a series of things that you “have to” do, or are you having life experiences that you “get to” do? There is a huge emotional difference and the results are quite different too.
How we tell our own story to ourselves either gives up pathways to joy or shuts us down from finding all the wonderful things and experiences that we can delight in. It is and will always be up to us to make every situation and thing in our life desirable and full of meaning for us. Your perspective is malleable and if you are questioning your life honestly then it is also evolving. Be sure you know what you are choosing when you decide to believe what you do.
I am love. I am joy. I am so very good.
Picture: This was a few years ago when I went to Colorado and had Thanksgiving with my first wife, Shawna and her mother, sister and brother-in-law. I still love them all like family!
