Happiness and Bookishness

Are you happy?

Or joyful?

Or whatever you want to call it?

6 months or so ago, I was convicted/inspired by my coworker telling me about a book called The Happiness Project. Hearing her synopsis of the book, I realized something dangerously sad.

How much of my emotional capacity (and yours) is spent feeling guilty about being happy? This guilt is something that many of us don't even realize we do to ourselves. Society only allows us to acknowledge that we (humans) control our own destiny and choose to be happy or not. End of story. External things do not, in and of themselves, create happiness.

I am a contentedly bookish creature by nature, yet I often do not allow myself to be so, simply because of the demands of the world.

But we are hypocrites of the most perilous breed.  For, in reality, we scoff about the idea of investing time in truly happy tasks, yet we are starving ourselves. Then, with one hand, the only thing we can talk about is ourselves and our fundamental right to be happy. But on the other, we grasp at things that fail to do so time and time again. Money, power, technology, crappy relationships, drugs, etc.

Since then, I've thought a lot more about what brings me joy.

This brings me to the results of NaNoWriMo. (National Novel Writing Month, for ye newcomers.) Some of you know that I made a resolution to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. After nights of plotting and scribbling and chatting with my cousin, I succeeded.

The rush could not be imitated by anything else.

(Side note: The result of this experiment was shocking. I had no idea I was capable of producing this kind of work in one month. But now I know. And I won't hold myself to anything less in a project now. Funny what zero procrastination can get you, eh?)

So writing, obviously, is one. But reading, too, is something that warms my soul at its very depths, yet I realized that in the busyings of life, it was falling by the wayside every. Single. Time. A writer who reads not? How tragic.

As a result, I made storybook reading a priority. Since then, I have read more fantastical stories than I had in over 5 years.

Life is still hard. But what do we prove by depriving ourselves of those small joys that it brings?