Journal #1 - Why am I so happy? (50) - Incrium
I feel pretty happy this morning. I like it a lot. It feels easy to just write and learn. I wish all my mornings were like this. I'm going to try:
A friend of mine once sent me the following in an email conversation, when she mentioned how happiness was for her a matter of deliberate choice and I'd asked something like "How do you do that?"
It's relatively easy, once you know the trick. The trick is to remember how you feel when you feel really good. Consciously see what you see when you feel good, hear what you hear, notice the body sensation. Then, to start, imagine each one of them. When you feel good, rev it up by making it bigger and brighter and louder and more intense. Send the feeling through your whole body, then let it leave (it will want to leave from a specific place, just like the feeling will want to start in a particular space... as the feeling leaves (say through your toes) circle it around and let it come in again where it started.
The specific sensations I found to attach to that advice were those I associated with walking slowly in fresh air with bright sun warming my eyelids, face, shoulder and back, just basking in that spring sun, doing what I call my plant impression...
I'm not really conversant with NLP but that's where she said she got this from, and I do credit that single paragraph with significant contributions to improving my mood over the seven years since that conversation. (Even though, rereading it just now, I realize I rarely do much more than just recalling that happy feeling; the circling stuff around I've usually skipped.)
comment on this (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xnPFYBuaGhpq869mY/ureshiku-naritai) post
What do I feel right now?
I think the biggest thing is that I feel hopeful. A few days ago, I was frustrated because there's so much in my life I want to figure out but it's a tangeld mess. That feels like an opportunity. Over they years, much learning has felt less interesting to me because my expectancy dropped. My expectancy feels higher for learning right now because hope raises all my expectancy. Epistemologically, this seems great! There's so much to learn and apply and improve with. There are things I'm struggling to reason with but who cares! The best I can do is definitionally the best I can do; no need to worry about anything beyond that.
I want to keep this. I want to be always hopeful. I want to do things and feel like they're worth doing. I want to be able to enjoy processes.
I also feel some amount of love for something but love has a large semantic space and I don't know how I'd define it. I was at a party 2 nights ago. I like asking people about themselves. I found sometimes though that it was hard to continue some conversations and that I got a bit bored. Thinking back, that feels crazy! There are so many more questions I could've asked these people. What was your childhood like? What do you think is the coolest project you aren't working on? What do you want your life to be like? Who do you think is the person in the world you love the most? Who's the person who's positively influenced your life the most? There's so much complexity inside people.
There's some sort of internal vibe that's also bouncing around. Something that reminds me of my childhod and a little bit of when I was in France, though mildly. There's a feeling I've been able to tell I used to have more when I was a kid, that there was a future ahead of me and that I didn't need to hurry so hard. I'm not sure what I feel about hurrying but I think the feeling of hope and potential I had more of as a child was really nice.
The world owes me nothing.