Today is a good day for being Pooh…

The title is a quote from one of my favourite fictional characters: Winnie the Pooh (more specifically from the book 'Pooh's Grand Adventure'). If you think Winnie the Pooh is just a stupid, dumb, lazy, fat bear for the entertainment of children, you know nothing. You should read one of my favorite books of all time: 'The Tao of Pooh' by Benjamin Hoff. Pooh is a zenn-master, a taoist in its purest form, as I aspire to be. If you have read 'the Tao of Pooh' , you will understand this intro is highly relevant to this blogpost. 

The topic I want to talk about now is one I am thinking about a while already, a very long while actually. Recently I saw Katrin Berndt (a YouTuber I follow) bringing up the same subject, so that inspired me to get down to the bottom off this and write out my thoughts. Thank you Katrin. 

I'm going to start right out the gate: 'What does it take for you to have a good day?'. This is the topic we are discussing right now and I am genuinely interested in your answer to the question, so you are very very very welcome to share it with me.

Please let me explain the question a little bit more thoroughly. You know that moment when you go to bed at the end of the day and you feel really great and happy about this day, you accomplished all your goals for the day (which seemed to be an impossibly long to-do-list but somehow you already finished half of it before 10 a.m.), moreover your boss gave you a phonecall to announce you got a big raise at work, that annoying neighbour finally decided to move to another continent, it seemed you had super-human strength in your work-out routine, .... You know, you really felt the universe working for/with you today and you go to sleep with an immense feeling of pride in your achievements, fulfillment and allround happiness.

Do you know how often I feel like that when going to bed? Or rather, do you know how often I allow myself (I'll come back to this in a minute) to feel like that when going to bed? In the most depressive periods of my life, the answer is zero. In a good period maybe once in three months.

So what is this all about? Well, I found out that I am not a happy and optimistic person (I don't know if that is even a thing, a happy person). That doesn't mean I can't feel happiness or optimism. Happy is just not my default state of mind. Being (and acting) happy generally does ask some effort for me (some days more than others) and it can really be an energy drain when your surroundings (other people and/or situation) demand you to be happy (I do take pride in the fact that I self-taught myself to somehow seem happy).

So some of you are now probably questioning my mental state and if you have some knowledge of psychology I probably already fit in some of your mental-issues-boxes. Probably you are even right. I am not going to deny I contemplate my own mental sanity on a regular basis and I definitely have had long lasting depressive states of mind.

So... In my defence... Beside the fact that I'm probably a mentally disturbed (or disturbing?) person, I want to accuse an elephant in the room: our productiveness-driven-society. I must now sound very much like Christopher McCandless. The fact that his way of thinking brought him to an early lonesome death probably is not helping my plea.

I really firmly believe that your state of mind is a choice. As I mentioned a little bit above already, it comes down to ALLOWING yourself to feel happy (or that is at least how it works for me). The reason I believe that, is because from time to time I do experience it on a blissfull moment. Sometimes I achieve great mental transformation, although it always costs me great amounts of energy. Sometimes I actively decide to change my mood and sometimes I do succeed. I just would like to get better at that, I would like it to be more effortless. The problem is that I feel pre-programmed to be worried. I feel pre-programmed that whatever I did wasn't good enough, wasn't fast enough, wasn't strong enough, wasn't high enough,... This can work very contraproductive and paralysing (if it will never be enough, than why go through the effort of even starting, why do anything at all?).

I think it should be okay to have a perfectly lazy and most inefficient day and afterwards still feel the utmost bliss and pride in oneself when dozing of to sleep. And I am sure most people will agree with me when reading this, but at the same time they will probably realise (if they are truly honest) that that is not what we have been taught.

So I ask you again. What does it take for you to allow yourself te be happy? And maybe the opposite is interesting as well. What does it take for your day to feel ruined? If I don't manage my thought-process well enough I feel like the day will only be a success if at least I found that very day the genie in a lamp to grant me three wishes, on the other hand the day can already feel ruined by waking up and noticing a mosquito wanted a midnight snack and the blood of my little toe was it's craving.

I do feel I am getting better at managing my thoughts, but it does take effort. I am trying to be more mindfull about my own thoughts and I am lowering my expectations of what life should be. Maybe that's incorrect. I am not lowering my expectations of what life should be. I am trying to discard completely the expectations society has learned me to have. And with that everything becomes a possibility, even a mindfull blissfull lazy day.

Greetings

B. Supertramp