I’m a huge I Love Lucy fan. I’ve seen every episode several times and even have a few DVDs of the classic ones. Remember the one where Lucy had to advertise vitameatavegemin? Join a bunch of happy peppy people with vitameatavegemin! Wouldn’t it be great to have a product that turned us all into happy peppy people?
The Even Happier Quest seems to be that product for me. Each month I’ve had a favorite task that I’ve kept doing even after the month was over. If I keep up at this rate, I’ll have 12 things that make me even happier by the end of this year. At a minimum! How cool is that?! I cracked open my Happiness Project book last week to read what was in store.
As I mentioned before, I don’t read ahead. I wait until the first of the month and then read about the next monthly mission. I love surprises and May has a great goal. I bet I get more than one favorite task out of May. I’ve already got several ideas in mind. This month we are challenged to Be Serious About Play! This was made for me.
I could use a little more play time in my life. Studies have shown that using your creative side (AKA doing fun things) leads to happiness. Regularly having fun is a key to happiness and people who have fun are up to twenty times more likely to be happy. Duh! Do we really need a study to tell us that? OK, maybe the “up to 20 times” part to make it official but the rest is common sense.
We all need to make time for more leisure time. Time to do stuff that we want and love to do, dream about doing. It’s not necessarily playing like sitting down on the floor with your kids playing with trucks and dolls. It’s more about doing what is meaningful to you to cultivate your creativity.
Forget what everyone else considers play. Someone else’s idea may not work for you and may even have the opposite effect. Someone may love rock climbing, but that would drive me over the edge. Not my idea of fun. Do you want to learn something new? Brush up on a long forgotten skill? Get back to a craft that you once had time for but life got in the way? It’s time to Find More Fun!
I desperately need this task because I spend far too much time stressing about things that honestly could wait or be done less often. I need a chill pill for sure. Like clockwork every weekend I clean the house. Even if the house is relatively clean, I clean it. It takes me about 2 hours. Will the world fall apart if I don’t do this every weekend? Nope. Will anyone but me notice if I don’t do this? Nope. Will I be laughed at and ridiculed forever if I wait? Nope.
Sooooo… deep breath… I’m going to try not to clean every weekend. I’ve got heart palpitations already and am planning to ease into it with a scaled down, hour long version to start with and then maybe move into cleaning every other week. This will give me some extra time to pursue stuff that is more play like.
Maybe the play stuff will be so exciting I won’t even notice if there is dog fur and piles of magazines in the midst of dust. ;-). So off I go on the task to Be Serious About Play. What is something that you’ve always wanted to do for fun but don’t have the time?
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