Tonight a collection of our best Happiness Resources posts, enjoy and have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. ~Harriet Tubman
I have hit a certain point in my life that calls for reflection, you see I’ve been relatively successful. I have achieved many of the things in my life I had hoped to achieve, in some ways I’ve exceeded rational expectations for someone coming from my beginnings. I have a good career, respect, I’ve traveled, I speak a couple of languages and have had a range of experiences that would make many people enviable. I enter at this point in my life what many people would call middle age and it brings on a certain of level of contemplation. You see at this point in life you have a history, you have made mistakes, but more importantly you have made lots and lots of decisions. All decisions have consequences and once you have enough time, you can see what the consequences of those decisions have wrought.
At this age you begin thinking about purpose and mortality, you delve into a strong mixture of fear and a need for seeing a purpose to your life. Within the depths of this I completely and totally understand the two outcomes, the two paths that lay open to me in life. Those paths are either hedonism or significance. The first path is the cliché of the mid-life crisis, the stereotypical chasing of material things and pleasures. There is a pointlessness you can find in life if you look hard enough and a hedonistic response does not seem unreasonable facing that reality.
However, if you take a look beyond yourself, use a wider lens if you will, think about a longer timeline, I don’t thing hedonism is the answer. You see either path calls for passion and passion spent on hedonism has always felt more than a little empty to me, I took that train in my twenties, I didn’t like where it went. So it’s time for passion in the pursuit of significance and for many people this is an easy call, they pour their passion into their children. Raising their children becomes the passionate pursuit for significance in their life and quite a worthy one in my opinion.
So my question tonight, and for me, at this time in my life as someone without children, is where to put my passion? So my question for you tonight my friends is the same, what is your passion and how is it directed, find that and happiness won’t be too far behind. As always, have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Fear is Killing Your Happiness
Our Best Happiness Posts for 2015
Lonely desert highway
Career is what you are paid for. Callings is what you are made for? ~ Ed Young
One of the questions people are most familiar with is, what do you want to be when you grow up? I really don’t like this question, I circumvent it with a really easy answer, I’m not planning to grow up? Now as flippant an answer there is, there is some underlying wisdom that I accidentally stumbled upon. You see, it is in childhood that we are able to get lost in something we love. Remembering playing as a kid I can remember hours playing sports, building dams on streams, playing with toys in my room or just walking in the woods.
Dramatic skies in the Mojave Desert
I’ve worked in education for over 25 years and a lot of that time I’ve worked with students in helping them find their way to a major and direction in college. One of the ways we first try to help students do this is by asking them what they are interested in. One way to do that is to think about the types of things you do where you lose track of time. So if you can lose track of time while drawing and painting for hours a career in the arts might be something you’ll enjoy.
For students, honestly, the process isn’t that hard. You establish what they like, you find out what their aptitudes are and those two pieces of information really narrows down the possibilities. You can’t be an engineer if you’re terrible at and dislike math, no matter how much you like building and designing things. But you might be a great construction worker, welder or project manager. So after narrowing the field, a student can explore a bit by taking classes or other activities and come to a pretty solid decision on where their career will start. We also recognize that people will change jobs multiple times over their lifetime.
Floating lights
The tougher job is of course when you’re trying to help someone in their 30’s, 40’s or 50’s find their way. Even harder when the person you’re trying to help is looking back at you in the mirror. As we get older we all accumulate obligations, our decisions have a tendency to impact more than just ourselves, we have debts. All of our obligations make the process of pursuing our calling that much harder even when we can identify that calling. It can still be done, it just takes a lot more planning, work and negotiation with those whose lives we’re intertwined with and of course patience.
I’m in the midst of all of this myself. This week while on a business trip I was working with a company that has a software package that helps students identify their calling. While talking to one of their people about my adventures over the last couple of years he said, “you’ve found your calling.” He was referring of course to traveling, writing, photographing and speaking about my adventures. Without a doubt this is my calling.
The PCT as it leaves the deserts and enters the Sierras
If I were in my 20’s its an easy call, flat-out jump in with both feet. Of course I’m in my 50’s, I have a significant student loan debt ($800/month) and then there’s retirement looming. I have a good life, a good job, I make good money, I have health insurance and if I put enough time into my retirement system I’ll have a decent pension. My job is ok, I like what I do, but the question, in such a short life, do I wake up in the morning excited to go to work, no. It is a job, a good one, but a job. Would I be excited to get up everyday to hike, and cycle, to write and photograph what I do, to go out and be a speaker to help motivate people to make positive change in their life, absolutely.
The retirement issue is probably my largest obstacle, I wasn’t in a position early on to start saving for retirement the way I should have, and worse, not wise enough to do the minimum that would have absolutely paid dividends through the miracle of compound interest. But that didn’t happen, so you make the best of where you are and that is the first step, having a positive attitude.
So I do what I can, it’s partially the reason I take significant time off every 5 years. My book is being edited and will hopefully be published before the end of the year. I have a couple of speaking engagements lined up and plans for a couple of other books that I’m already working on. I look forward to my next leave in about three years and try to find ways to the things I love in between. Of course I’m always looking for a crack, a way to make a significant change that will work and that hope is part of what sustains me day-to-day.
Light festival in Spokane
So that’s the process my friends, for those of us who are older and more obligated. Find your calling, and start to develop a path. Find incremental ways to test the waters and to feed your soul. Plan for the time you can jump full-time but always be on the look out for that lucky break, if you get that shot and you’ve been planning, it’s that much more likely to be successful. Finally, be prepared to be a little bit fearless, life is short and the last thing anyone wants to do, is to be laying on their deathbed regretting never have taken their shot. So feed your soul, plan, be positive, be fearless and have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Happiness and the Benefits of Gratitude
Fear is Killing Your Happiness
Defensiveness is usually someone silently screaming that they need you to value and respect them in disguise. When you look for deeper meanings behind someone’s pain you can then begin to heal not only yourself, but others. ~ Shannon L Alders
It is funny how often ideas come to me while driving, and while on the way to the gym today something hit me. I was thinking about a past relationship and how what I really couldn’t get past in the relationship was her damage. She was a great girl, but in her life she had been hurt too many times by other men. This manifested in ways that I could not accept, that kept us from being at peace in our relationship. This is not blame, only recognition; I have plenty of damage of my own. For me, I’ve been somewhat slow in my emotional growth and as a loner I have a hard time bonding with others. Add to that terrible timing in my relationships and for a very long time an inability to be fully open or trusting and you might not be surprised to know I’m not married. However to be fair, being married has never been a significant goal of mine, if it happens that would be great, but I won’t do it unless it truly feels right.
We are all damaged, the real trick is to understand and know ourselves well enough to know how we are damaged. Some of us can do this work on our own, some of us need counseling or other help to understand these issues. Once you know where and how you are damaged, that’s when the work begins because you have to work to fix these things. I’ve done a lot of work over the years, a lot of my damage has been repaired. Many of the things that doomed my previous relationships have been dealt with to my satisfaction but I’m still working and still on the path.
So my friends the keys are to know yourself, do your work and also try to be as accepting as you can be of the damage that exists in others. We are all in this together and forgiveness and acceptance are powerful acts. So understand, work, accept, forgive and have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
If you are the kind of person who is waiting for the ‘right’ thing to happen, you might wait for a long time. It’s like waiting for all of the traffic lights to be green for five miles before starting the trip. ~ Robert Kiyosaki
It’s New Year’s Day, the first day of the new year, so what? Seriously, New Year’s Day is just another day, the only difference between January 1st, and August 12th is the significance that we place on that particular day. You see every new day, can be the start of something new for you. However, since we all place so much emphasis on the new year I’m writing this post today.
What I’m asking you today friends, is to start something new, commit to it, make it something you will get done. I know, I know you think I’m talking about the same old New Year’s resolutions talk, it’s not. I’m really not, our New Year’s resolutions are almost always the same old things, lose weight, stop smoking, be nicer to your relatives, go back to school, whatever. I see this every year at whatever gym I’m a member of at the time. In early December the gym levels start to diminish. By the week of Christmas the gym is a ghost town, there’s hardly anyone in there. Then, a few days after Christmas it starts, the numbers increase right around the New Year, with all of their weight loss, stop smoking, start exercising resolutions in their head, people appear. You see the gym staff constantly giving tours, you see people who don’t know how to use the machines and people are always on the machine you want to be on. The really sad thing, is that by the end of January the gym is completely back to normal, it seems people’s resolve to create something new has a half-life of about four weeks, until it is resurrected next year for another four weeks.
So no, I’m not asking you to go through the same old process. What I’m suggesting is that this year, you do something completely different. Let’s almost start the same way, let’s pick a goal, a resolution if you need to use the same old language. However, that’s where the similarities will stop. We have a tendency to pick resolutions that society thinks we should pick, things that society and sometimes, we think are best for us. Things like stopping smoking, exercising and losing weight. Now these are all things that would be great for us to do, but if we truly have no desire, if there is no passion for this resolution we’ve selected, then four weeks sounds about right to me.
So for this year, let’s ignore what we’re “supposed” to do. Let’s think about what gets us fired up, what gets us excited, what is that thing that will get you out of bed without having to set the alarm. Is there something you love to do, knit sweaters, build bird houses, walk in nature or photography? Or maybe there is something you’ve always thought in the back of your mind, man I wish I could speak Italian and travel in Italy. Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn how to play the guitar. Whatever it is, that’s were you need to focus the resolution, where you need to start. So let’s say you’ve decided you want to speak Italian and travel in Italy.
So, a trip to Italy isn’t cheap and you can’t learn a language in 3 weeks no matter what the ads for Babbel say. So, you have your goal, start with a little dreaming. Spend sometime online looking at images of Italy, envisioning sipping wine on the Amalfi coast looking at the ocean. Look at tours, self-guided trips, find and read some blogs on traveling in Italy. Start constructing that perfect trip to Italy, maybe it’s walking galleries and museums in Florence, floating on a gondola in Venice, strolling past ancient ruins in Rome or all of the above.
Now, start setting timelines, develop a budget and get a plan for learning Italian. Figure out, how bit by bit you’ll put away the money for the trip. Start learning Italian, there are so many ways to do this, sometimes there are free community classes, you can take out Italian language learning books from the public library, there are community college language classes, there are free apps on the net, I’m particularly fond of Duolingo. BE REALISTIC, make sure that your budget timeline has some cushion in it. Give yourself lots of time to learn a language and don’t make fluency your goal. Make your goal something I call survival language skills. Learn hello, goodbye, thank you and please. Learn the names of foods, key phrases like I need a taxi or where is the train station. It’s amazing how well you can navigate modern cities with a smart phone and some rudimentary language skills.
Make all of this fun, watch Italian movies, make Italian friends online, visit museums and cultural sites virtually online. Read the blogs of travelers who are traveling in Italy and take note of, but generally ignore any negativity about their experiences. Go to Italian food festivals and restaurants in your or nearby towns. And most importantly, make sure, five days a week you do something related to language and travel in Italy.
Finally stick to it and in the end go to Italy, enjoy, have fun, blog it out, start an Instagram page for your trip and share it with other people so that you can help motivate them.
Why am I suggesting this whole process, shouldn’t I be suggesting something health and happiness related? Well my friends I have. First a trip to someplace you always wanted to go will help make you happier. I am, as you know if you read this blog, a huge proponent of all the positive things getting out of your comfort zone and travel does for you. Second, if you’ve developed even rudimentary language skills you’re learning and education will always help make you happier. If you pull this trip off you’ve created a goal and achieved it, you’ve proven to yourself that you can do that, and then you can plan bigger and bigger goals that will make your life more satisfying and happier. This works even if your goal was to paint or play guitar one hour a week for a year. Even if your goal was to take an hour, one day a week and do nothing but relax, listen to music or read a book. It’s the goal setting and success that matters, not the topic. This will bleed over, for me, just going to the gym, turned into eating better, losing weight and even more consistently writing this blog. This process has led me to take on a new language Spanish and even to living in Mexico for two months this past year.
I believe in you, now you need to believe in yourself, and really importantly don’t let your fear get in the way, fear is killing your happiness. You can do this and not only have happier days, but happier years my friend, go out and make 2019 your year. ~ Rev Kane
The holidays are a very stressful time for everyone and an exceptionally hard time for some. So, until the New Year I’ll be posting a Holiday Happiness post each day to try help folks out who are struggling. As always you can reach out to me at Happinesskane@aol.com for a kind word or someone to listen. ~ Rev Kane
It’s not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness ~ Charles Spurgeon
Tonight a simple post full of nice positive and hopefully thought provoking quotes to help you have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Happiness is Poetry: Langston Hughes
Happiness is Art: Pablo Picasso
The Art of Smiling and Being Positive
Twelve Days of Christmas – For People Who Don’t Like Christmas
Fear is Killing Your Happiness
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. ~ Marcel Proust
The holidays are a very stressful time for everyone and an exceptionally hard time for some. So, until the New Year I’ll be posting a Holiday Happiness post each day to try help folks out who are struggling. As always you can reach out to me at Happinesskane@aol.com for a kind word or someone to listen. ~ Rev Kane
Tonight a sweet little piece about happiness and gardening – Achieving Happiness in your Garden the Twelfth Secret I know what you’re thinking, the Rev has finally lost his mind, he’s doing gardening posts in December. I haven’t my friends, I promise, the twelfth secret in this lovely little gardening piece is plant for the future.
Tonight, in the middle of the Winter, during the holidays at a time that is really tough for some folks, plant for the future, is a great message. It’s ok that you don’t feel great right now, but you can make things better. So start thinking about what that better, happier future looks like and what it takes to get there. That allows you to do some daydreaming and some planning about better things and that may just make tonight a little bit better, and lead to happy days my friends ~ Rev Kane
Resources for Fighting Holiday Depression
The Art of Smiling and Being Positive
Twelve Days of Christmas – For People Who Don’t Like Christmas
Who can’t relate to the idea of leaving one chapter behind and moving on to the next. ~ Mike Shinoda
Art in Oaxaca
I’ve left Oaxaca after two months. My original plan was to stay there for four months but I decided to leave early. To be very clear, it was not because I didn’t enjoy Oaxaca. I think it’s been obvious from my posts the last two months, and if not, tonight’s post will likely read a bit like a love letter to Oaxaca and Mexico. First, why did I leave early? My main reasons for going to Oaxaca included a new adventure, a chance to live overseas in one spot for an extended time, to attend language school and scout out Oaxaca as a potential retirement destination.
Rev Kane at Mitla
What I realized after a few weeks was that doing more than four consecutive weeks of language study was going to overload my brain. It seems like a better plan to keep working on my skills in smaller block over a longer time than trying to do it all at once. So, staying in Oaxaca without school, having done most of the tourist things you can do, didn’t seem to make much sense. So I decided to stay a week after school wrapped up and return to the United States. I’d lived overseas for two months, it had certainly been a fun adventure and Oaxaca is definitely on my list of potential retirement locations.
One of many parades in Oaxaca while I was there
I missed Oaxaca the first second I got off the plane in New York, damn it was cold. I realized I hadn’t seen a temperature under seventy degrees in almost a year. Although I grew up in the cold weather, it is taking me a bit of time to get re-acclimated to it. Then I bought an airport sandwich and I really missed Oaxaca. It was so inexpensive to live there and I get reminders every single day. My reminder this morning came at the laundromat. The cheapest top loader was $5.50, now that’s expensive by US standards, but the total of almost ten dollars to do a load of laundry was a shock to my system. In Oaxaca, that ten dollars would have paid for someone else to do my laundry for five weeks, throw in what I also had to pay for detergent and we’re up to seven weeks, not including the time savings. Your money goes a long way in Southern Mexico.
The Instituto Cultural Oaxaca was a nice place. What was especially awesome was having so many travelers passing through every week. I was constantly meeting people from other countries and other places. People were so nice, not just at the institute but in Oaxaca as a whole. Something I observed decades ago and came up in conversation with a fellow traveler in customs is how nice and generous the poorest people are when you meet them. Oaxaca City is a poor place and people there were almost always nice and generous, they were incredibly patient with my language skills. I noticed it almost immediately in America, people are grouchier, more stressed, in a bigger hurry. Of course a fast placed city like New York made the contrast more extreme than normal, but the feeling has held up in rural New York and even in Delaware where I am at this time.
It’s one thing for food to be inexpensive but eating in Oaxaca was amazing. My last dinner in Oaxaca was a plate of Tacos al Pastore at Tacos Roy near my apartment. Tacos al Pastore are shawarma meat that is then ground, they are absolutely delicious. So to start, my plate of four tacos with all of the fixins and a coke was three dollars. But it’s not just that the food was inexpensive but it was delicious. Everyday meals of tacos, tlayudas, sandwiches or salads were fantastic. But special meals like my pork in mole Almindrino was among some of the best meals I’ve ever had. Heck, one of my earliest meals in town was at a corner restaurant. From the sign, I expected enchiladas, tacos, etc… but the sign was traditional breakfast fare and it was three in the afternoon. So, my options were shrimp in several different forms, I settled on a shrimp cocktail, I was hungry so I got a large for four dollars. It was by far the biggest shrimp cocktail I’ve ever seen. It was huge, in a giant glass like you’d get an ice cream sunday in at Friendly’s. It was jammed with like twenty huge shrimp, a sweet cocktail sauce and topped with slices of avocado and cilantro and a handful of crackers came with it. Adding a drink my meal was five dollars and it was delicious, the best shrimp cocktail ever. A five dollar shrimp cocktail in America would be four jumbo shrimp or a handful of microscopic cocktail shrimp. Eating in Oaxaca was simply a joy.
Although my heart is certainly still in Oaxaca, it’s time to move forward. I’ll continue to post photos from Mexico on my Instagram feed (@ReverendMichaelKane) for a time. I’m currently hanging out at the beach in DelMarVa, the jumble of state abbreviations that defines the coastal area I’m in. I’m spending a week on the beach in Delaware before returning to visit family in NY for Christmas. From there I’ll be moving South and West for a bit and am planning a month in Gulf Shores, AL. My big goals over the next month or so is to get some writing done, a little painting, some photography and begin the slow process of becoming employed again. Lot’s of detail oriented things to deal with.
Sun reflecting off Hierve el Agua
From there, who knows, it will depend on what jobs I’m chasing, if any consulting opportunities materialize, if I hit the lottery, the usual. Once the job situation gets worked out, we’ll see if there’s time and money for one more big adventure, perhaps a trip to Panama is on tap, we’ll see what the universe has in store for me and as always, have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Simple Joy
Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life. ~ Omar Khayyam
So I sat down tonight to do my weekly post and I hit the wall that is writer’s block. I played some of the mental games I normally do in this situation and nothing seemed to help. Nor did cooking a pot of curry, a shower, a fire or anything else. Finally, in a last attempt to stir my brain I Googled happiness and the first thing that popped up was a definition. So I decided tonight that I should answer that most basic of question, what is happiness.
Let’s start with the dictionary definition:
Happiness is a mental or emotional state of well-being defined by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. Happy mental states may also reflect judgements by a person about their overall well-being.
One of the places, as the quote suggests, where I find happiness is in nature. I love hiking and just being in nature. Natural quiet is something I seek out as our world becomes ever louder. To be able to sit in the sun and hear nothing but natural sound brings me incredible contentment.
We all have those moments and times where we find joy, pleasure or contentment. But we do not survive on just those moments, they provide temporary sustenance for our souls but my goal is to live in a state of happiness. I’m not naive, I realize that no person is happy every single second of their life. Things happen to us, those close to us are hurt or die. We make the wrong choice and get our hearts broken and sometime the vagaries of chance claim our day. Yes, these things will happen to all of us, they are unavoidable.
This is why I’d like to add something to the dictionary definition of happiness. Resilience, happiness is about feeling joy and contentment, but it’s also about resilience. Resilience is your ability to bounce back after a set back or even tragedy. First, it’s important that we know what happiness is, that we experience joy and contentment so that we know what state of being we’re chasing. Second, we need to become stronger people, we need to understand that we can survive the things that happen to us. We can not only overcome and get past them, but that we can be happy again. You can learn how to build all four types of resilience.
We must develop the tools and habits in our life to make sure we can attain happiness when things go wrong. We have to associate ourselves with people who make us feel good about ourselves. We need to smile, choose to be positive and to take the best side of any situation. We need to be grateful for what we have and express that gratitude. At a most basic level we need to stay healthy, we need to sleep enough, avoid stress, exercise and eat right.
If we do these things we can be happy, we can stay in a state of contentment and find joy and even when things go wrong we can find our way back and have happy days my friends ~ Rev Kane
Happiness and the Benefits of Gratitude
The holidays are often a very stressful period for people so for the next 34 days (Thanksgiving through Christmas) we’re going to do a post a day, something happy and uplifting each day, perhaps an image, a poem, a quote, a moment of happiness or some bit of wisdom all in an effort to boost everyone’s happiness a little bit. You can do your part by paying it forward, send these little bits of happiness on to others and ask that they do the same and as always, have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Worry is an addiction
That interferes with compassion
Worry is a problem that seems to be rampant. Perhaps it is due to the nature of our overly advanced civilization; perhaps it is a measure of our own spiritual degneracy. Whatever the source, it is clear that worry is not useful. It is a cancer of the emotions-concern gone compulsive. It eats away at the body and the mind.
It does no good to say, “Don’t think about it.” You’ll only worry more. It is far better to keep walking your path, changing what you can. The rest must be dissolved in compassion. In this world of infants with immune deficiencies, racial injustice, economic imbalance, personal violence, and international conflict, it is impossible to address everyone’s concerns. Taking care of yourself and doing something good for those whom you meet is enough. That is compassion, and we must exercise it even in the face of the overwhelming odds.
Whenever you meet a problem, help it if is in your power to do so. After you have acted, withdraw and be unconcerned about it. Walk on without ever mentioning it to anybody. There there is no worry, because there has been action.
The Art of Smiling and Being Positive
Twelve Days of Christmas – For People Who Don’t Like Christmas
Fear is Killing Your Happiness
The Ministry of Happiness 