Have you got time to be happy?

Because every day is better when your happy!

Probs not, I mean with all the good series out at the moment, and the accessibility provided by Foxtel On Demand, not to mention the gossip sessions with pals and necessary winging over assignments and heat, I totally get that you more than likely don’t have the diary space to pencil in ‘happiness’.

Lol.

I don’t care if you have to get up before your first three alarms, or have to miss the entrée. You best make time for this essential activity. A smile a day. Two, three, four, a hundred. As many as you can in fact, winner is the best.

Today I will be gathering a camaraderie of troops to commence 100 days of happiness. 

Be an experimenter, a YES man! 100% money back guarantee!

The old you would do it, join me in the #100happydays challenge here.

A passionate discussion on passion, not pashing.

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There’s a lot of noise at the moment about passion.

Passionfruit has always been delish, and Passiona a somewhat refreshing beverage.

But take away these suffixes, then your’e just left with little old passion. Just. Left. With. Passion. A 7 letter gem that shapes a lot of what the mystics call their ‘life-purpose’, what the entrepreneurs label their ‘calling’, and what I like to call, something bloody massive I just cant decide on.

I mean, personally, I want to be a writer, a dancer (currently I’m perfecting the moonwalk), a surfer (thanks Blue Crush), a corporate bitch, a band-member, a hippie who lives in a combi in Byron and sells handmade jewellery, a yoga instructor, a Buddhist monk, a mining magnate, Miranda Kerr… basically, everything under the sun.

I guess in my fiasco of options, I am desperately just trying to define my, wait for it… PASSION.

As I learn more about the said, 7 letter-er, I can safely say the two of us are slowly becoming friends.

Motivational books will tell you to “follow your passion” if happiness is what you truly seek, but thanks Confucius, how am I meant to follow something when I don’t even know what it looks like? There is no road-sign, no Google answer, not even a Wikipedia article that precisely tells me what my passion is. So, your notions of living a purposeful life are really of no help to me at all, not unless you help me find it anyway.

So I assigned myself a James Bond mission to get to the bottom of the P word. What I found was surprisingly simple.

What. Do. You. Love. 

But here’s the catch, you have to limit it to 10. And list them in order.

These are your passions. Voila!

A 10-point list could very well include:

·      Cheerleading,

·      Shopping,

·      Travelling,

·      Eating McDonald’s fries,

·      Being with friends,

·      Reading,

·      Watching the Disney Channel,

·      Playing in the pool,

·      Playing with dogs,

·      Being in the sun.

Please note these are the Top 10 ‘passions’ of my 12 year-old sister.

So enlighten me, how on earth is she going to make a career out of being a dog-loving, junk-food munching, cheerleader? Truth is, mate, she’s not.

So as an informer big sister, do I tell her to discard all these fun things because, well honey, that ain’t gon’ pay the bills? 

Nope, I tell her to lap them up, do these things, and do them often!

Do them for as long as you stop loving doing them, and when you do, find something more fun and enjoyable to replace them.

Because they are your passions.

(P.S she later argued, telling me that people actually can make money being a cheerleader, enough for a 50-cent cone anyway!)

I think what we get caught up in, is thinking that you have to find passion in a job or career, but truthfully, that would be condemning your crazy passions into a tiny hole and saying, ‘don’t move, breathe, or smile. No fun allowed’. Passion is so much more multi-faceted. 

Sure, we would all love to be Oprah, or Kelly Slater, doing for a job what we LOVE, but let’s be realistic. Don’t think that if you are not able to land your dream job on Getaway, that you are going to live in misery, you can be as happy as Pharrell, even if you are the toilet cleaner at Flinders Street Station on a Saturday night.

But “how” you scream. I’ll impart my wisdom with you, it’s all about how you spend the remaining 77 hours of your week (considering a 35 hour work week and 56 crucial beauty sleep provisions).

That my sweet child, is where you live your passions. Read, dance, bake, write, sing, play, laugh and laugh some more!

Even if you just spend half your free time doing the things you love, you have already outbid your day job. Kapish?

So basically, yeah. Homework for this week, list your ten passions, and sacrifice Game of thrones to play out your own fanstasy!

I would love to hear your thoughts on the passionate topic, and what activities and things come up in your Top 10 list.

 

P.S Take a leaf from Janey’s book, this gal is one passionate painter!