So I thought tonight it might be interesting to post a number pieces that share tips on living a happier life, if for nothing else than to see what the overlap was, have a look and have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
From Deepak Chopra
From LifeHack.com a pretty standard list
From the Happiness Institute
37 tips from Daring to Live Fully
From WebMD, 6 tips for overcoming barriers to happiness
How $10 can get you 7 hours of happiness
15 Tips to boost your well-being and fitness
The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash. ~Author Unknown
This is a repeat of an old post but one I think is really special ~ Rev Kane
First I have to thank a friend, Krissy for providing the link I’m going to share with you today. The link below is to a site that offers an audio recording from a story teller about riding the bus one day. On that day, on that bus, he encounters an old Jewish man who produces for him an orange and asks him what he thinks of it. The younger man doesn’t think much of the orange, it’s an orange. The old man goes on to explain what an orange is and can be, the clip is a six minute listen and if I may be so bold will be the six most intense and thought provoking moments of your day, give it a listen:
Hey you, yes you, the person who just skipped over the link because you don’t really have six whole minutes to spend on listening to a story about an orange, shut your office door, turn off the TV, or whatever can distract you and listen, six most intense, thought provoking and beautiful minutes of your day.
Remember the sweet things, the things that taste sweet, that look sweet, the sweet moments of your day, your life and even more importantly provide a sweet thing or moment for someone else. Maybe it’s a friend or a relative’s birthday. Well take a minute and don’t just leave happy birthday on their phone, let it all hang out, sing happy birthday with all of your might, out of tune and ridiculously and give them a really sweet happy birthday. Even just a hug today, unexpectedly and out of the blue for someone can be the sweetest thing, you never know what the person next to you is going through and that hug can be a sweet thing for them to remember and can make them have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. ~Marcel Proust
Fear is Killing Your Happiness
Our Best Happiness Posts of 2015
It’s not stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it. ~ Hans Selye
I wrote this post recently for one of my other blogs, Higher Ed Mentor and I thought it was worth a repeat her at the Ministry of Happiness. The post focuses on positions in education but I think the advice is applicable in any field.
Many positions in education can be highly stressful. Particularly higher education management positions at the Director or Deans level. These positions are very often your prototypical middle-management positions. What that means is that these positions have a large amount of responsibility and often unfortunately, very little authority or power. Now, I know a lot of other educational professionals, from instructors on up likely feel the same way and I know that there are plenty of jobs outside of education that also feel the same way. A big part of the problem is that in these positions it often feels like a one-way street. You are expected to provide support, service and even comfort to the people that you are responsible to and for, this means you are available 18 hours a day, you work long and a lot of hours, and at the end of the day there is limited thanks. This might even be tolerable if it wasn’t for the fact that the attitude that often pervades is what have you done for me, not even lately, but today. And while there are constant demands that never seem to end, very often from above there is limited recognition, limited praise and worst of all, limited understanding. The attitude often seems to be that you are eternally expected to always be professional, always be responsible, always have to be the bigger person no matter how unprofessional, aggressive and nefarious the people you supervise act. And because that is exactly what you do, remain professional and work by the book, you end up having to eat the treatment and the attitude. It’s the constant dealing with the lack of appreciation, double standards and living in the middle that makes these types of jobs so difficult and stressful.
Being an old dog in the system, having been a dean for almost fifteen years, I often have people who are early in their administrative career request to talk to me about being a dean. Recently, a relatively new dean came to me and asked me, “how have you done this for so long?” And it’s a fair question, the answer, really comes down to two things for me. First, I’ve taken an unconventional career path. Over the last ten years or so, I’ve taken breaks. Whether it’s been a nine month sabbatical to train and then spend a month hiking in the high passes of the Himalayas, taking a year off to hike the Appalachian Trail, or most recently taking a year to hike and travel in Europe and then live in Oaxaca City, Mexico for three months, I’ve broken up my time at work. Taking gap years and coming back to the system has some of it’s own stress and nervousness but what my path has shown is that it’s possible to do that and remain successful. And I realize that’s not something most people will do, although more of you could, it just takes planning and desire.
The second answer to the question is some basic rules that I follow in order to keep myself sane in this type of position.
You have to have the ability to separate who you are in the role, versus who you are as a person. So for me, Dean Kane and Michael are not the same person. Now I know a lot of people have a problem doing this, it goes against what we are told in our society that we are supposed to do. In America, you are supposed to wrap up your self-worth in your position. When asked who are you, or what do you do, we answer with our job title. You are not your job, you are so much more, your job is a facet of who you are and you need to treat it that way. I will add a caveat, there is a small subset of us out there who have found it, our perfect job. A job that we love so much, that brings so much love and fulfillment that you can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning to start doing it, for them, none of this applies.
I was once in a management retreat, there is a whole post I need to write about “retreats” but I digress. In this management retreat we were asked to raise our hand if our job was only a job, not something more. Two of us raised our hand, it was one of the most judged moments of my life. You could see the disappointment and outright disrespect on people’s faces. The executive leading the retreat immediately jumped in to say, it’s ok, people have a right to feel that way. As if treating your job as anything less than the central core of your life is wrong. So because it is such an ingrained thought, I will repeat, your job is a facet of your life, it doesn’t have to be the central core. And once it’s not the central core of your life, it should be treated as such. That doesn’t mean not being dedicated, or not doing a good job, it just means you recognize life is more than just work and that you can develop a satisfying work/life balance.
There is a lovely benefit to working in education, the work we do is quite noble. At the end of the day, regardless of your role in education, we are working to help people better their lives. This is an important thing to keep in mind as we work in highly stressful and difficult roles. We put up with the difficulties because at the end of the day the work we do is helping the process that leads to people bettering their lives. It can at times be a tenuous connection and difficult to see but it is legitimate and important. The further away you get from directly working with students, the harder it is to see this connection. Most of us started by working directly with students. As an instructor I got to see first hand those light bulb moments for students. As a student program director I got hear directly from students who I had helped get scholarships or helped successfully transfer to excellent institutions. As a dean, I no longer have those experiences with any regularity, so keeping in mind the impact we have needs to be a more conscious effort.
I can’t emphasize this enough. I have written extensively and done keynote speeches at conferences on the concept of developing a good work/life balance. It has been my experience that the more motivated and dedicated people are, the worse they are at maintaining this balance. There are a lot of things that we can talk about in this space, but for the sake of brevity I’ll limit myself to several of the more important points. First, you have to be committed to the idea. In most of our jobs there is literally a never-ending and repeating cycle of work. This means that no matter how hard you work, there will be more work to do tomorrow. I see this with staff who don’t take vacation. Often, they are so afraid of how much work will build up while they are on vacation that they limit the vacation they take. What’s worse, when they do take vacation, they end up checking email and working while on vacation defeating the very purpose of vacation. So you have to commit to downtime and taking vacations where you actually step away from work. Likewise, you have to have downtime each week, NEVER work seven days in a row, mostly because it’s nearly impossible to do. What I mean by that, is that once you’ve worked that seventh day, you now are into the next week and will work five more days, twelve in a row in total. So one of my cardinal rules for work/life balance is to always have at least one day a week where I do no work, no checking of email, no going to campus and as much as possible not even thinking about it.
Especially now during the pandemic you have to maintain a wall between work life and real life. For me, I do some very deliberate things. I do not friend anyone I work with on Facebook. I save that piece of social media to be as much as possible a work free space. A place where I can be completely myself without worrying about how that will impact my work life. We all wear masks in every situation and the masks we wear are work are different from the masks we wear with friends, I try and keep them separate as much as possible. Especially when working from home it’s easy to blend the two. Do your best to have a space in your home that is a work space and nothing else. And only work in that space, it’s an artificial wall, but one you need to create and adhere to as much as possible. I realize, particularly if you have children at home, this can be incredibly difficult, do the best you can.
We all need to express our frustrations to people who can truly understand what we are going through. Our partners and friends can certainly sympathize with our feelings and provide emotional support. But there is a difference when you can talk with someone who can truly understand where your frustrations come from. One of the advantages of being an old dog in this business and having worked at multiple colleges is that I have former colleagues to talk to. People who understand the difficulties of the position, who’ve been through the same sorts of frustrations that you have been through as well. They get it, they can truly understand and commiserate with you and even better can give you suggestions about how to deal with the frustration.
It’s very important that you have a career plan, I know this because we tell our students to do this. So what’s next for you? It’s important to understand how long you’ll be in the position, what position you’re heading for next or if not a different position what’s next for you? This isn’t so much so that you have something to be locked into but so that you have a direction and something to look forward and work toward that isn’t your normal job.
I think we all need two dreams. The first I call the lottery dream, what would I do if I won the lottery. It’s the reason I buy lottery tickets. As someone with a science background I can be a bit too rational at times. So dreaming my lottery dream doesn’t work so well if I haven’t bought a ticket. So I consider my $1 Superlotto ticket as my admission price to dream that dream. The second dream for me, very much is, the what’s next dream. I’m about six years out from retirement and I have dreams and plans about what life will be like in retirement. Much like the career plan we discussed, I think it’s important to have a plan to achieve your dreams. So of course, my lottery dream may include having a house in Maine and in Monterrey, but my secondary dream certainly can include a house in Maine in retirement. Again, this provides me with an outlet away from work.
There are lots of little things we can do every day to help reduce our stress. The first is to take email notifications off of your phone. I had them on until we got into the pandemic, once work from home started I felt a need to even further separate my two realities even more than I normally do. And even though seeing the notifications didn’t mean I would do anything, it put me mentally back into the workspace and that would lead to stress. Another thing that is important, is to take breaks during the day, it’s so easy to get swept up in the day, eat at your desk and not take breaks. Along with that set boundaries on your work hours, stop answering email and calls after a certain hour and not before a certain hour in the morning. Finally, find both physical and mental outlets for your energy. This might be meditation or Sudoku, drawing or painting anything that you enjoy that you can lose track of time while you’re doing it. And do something physical walk, hike, run, swim or workout something to get your body moving and burn off the stress. And finally, get enough sleep each night.
The thing is that I can absolutely tell when I’ve let some of these things start to slide in my life. I start to feel off, things don’t go right, I start getting short with people. Our jobs are really stressful and difficult, hopefully some of these tips can help you feel more comfortable in your position.
It’s funny how, when things seem the darkest, moments of beauty present themselves in the most unexpected places. ~ Karen Marie Moning
Modern live is full of anxiety, our 24 hour news cycle and the internet keep us thoroughly informed of every disaster, horror and reason for worry anywhere on the planet. Add to that an actual worry with the coronavirus outbreak and life can be anxiety filled indeed.
During these times we have a lot of things we need to be doing. Many are losing hours due to lack of work, stores are running out of certain foods and health products. We are worried about getting us or loved ones getting sick and trying to follow the social distancing protocols the government is asking us to entertain. People are being inconvenienced in so many ways, lack of child care, canceled trips and vacations, having to find new ways to work remotely.
So where are the silver linings? They’re actually all around us. Social distancing and isolation sounds really terrible. But let’s also remember that social distancing doesn’t mean you have to stay locked in your house. You can go out for a hike, or a stroll in a park. I saw a family today playing ball together in a field. This can be an opportunity to do some family activities together that don’t involve electronic devices. Lord knows we will all get plenty of time during this time of coronavirus to burn through our Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime ques, while adding new services like CBS All Access, Disney+ etc… But you also have time to read and get your kids to read more.
Although I’m a huge introvert and already spend a lot of time socially isolated, I will have even more time at home. So how am I going to use this extra time to my advantage? Mostly I’m going to put energy into things I always want more time to do. So I’ll be writing more, working on my Spanish, practicing guitar, doing some photography and organizing photos. This is a chance to cook more and get creative cooking with what you have in the house.
For those of you with the difficult task of keeping children entertained during this time. there are a lot of possibilities. Hopefully you stocked up on arts and crafts supplies, there are lot of internet resources including virtually experiencing the flight of Apollo 13, lots of museums who’ve put parts of their collections online and it’s a great time to help kids expand their skills. Build something with them, paint something and just play silly games with them. Make up crazy stories, who knows, you could turn into the next J.K. Rowling or JRR Tolkein.
Basically, as always, happiness and your attitude are a choice. You can choose to feel trapped and miserable and get lost in worry. Or you can take it as a fun challenge and find ways to make it enjoyable. But I’m not stupid, I realize that at some point if this goes on long enough it will get frustrating, you’ll get down. So remember to also be creative about finding ways to take care of yourself and get what you need. Feeling better also helps keep your immune system working. So have happy days my friends and stay well and safe. ~ Rev Kane
Sunset in the Himalayas
The only way to get to that next peak is to be ready for that next valley. Being raised Irish, you know to always be ready for the bad times. ~ Rory O’Malley
Today, the day I’m writing this piece, January 23, 2021 seams to be the current peak of the current COVID pandemic in the United States. There has been a lot of reporting in the news about how the pandemic is peaking. And currently, we are absolutely at a peak and it’s a horrible one. Currently there are around 200,000 people a day testing positive and well over 3500 Americans dying everyday in America. This peak is the highest number for both of these terrible metrics. And correspondingly, we are starting to see, and expect to see a dip in both numbers. People are very optimistic about all of this especially in light of the continued, albeit not effective, rollout of the vaccine. That’s great, and if people do what they should, continue to mask, social distance and get vaccinated, this could become the beginning of a decline that leads to very low levels of infection and a resumption of very near to a pre-COVID level of normal life. But if we don’t, well, this isn’t the first peak and a lesson we need to learn from that is that even after a peak, the numbers can go up, they have before.
As you can see from the image above that shows the number of infections over time, that our current peak is the fifth and highest peak so we have experienced so far in this pandemic. As you can see, the number of infections is declining sharply at the moment, just like it did for each of the last three peaks. I also think it’s important to note that in the first two peaks of the virus, when we had higher participation rates in the shutdown and social distancing, we did in fact flatten the curve. As people have tired of taking precautions and as we rolled into the holiday season, we failed miserably at flattening the infection curve. The figure truly shows that simply and clearly, it’s up to us and as we’ve decided to act irresponsibly, infections have risen. It also shows that there is a cycle to the infections, as infections rise, people do in fact get more careful and infection drops.
So, I’m also optimistic that this may be the beginning of a long-term decline in infection rates. My optimism comes from first, that people are in fact showing up to get vaccinated. Second, since things are so bad and people are starting to know someone who not just tested positive, but has had symptoms, they will, at least for a time, take the virus more seriously and take precautions. The third is behavioral, in the western and southern parts of the US, weather starts improving from February into March giving people more options to be outdoors, reducing the perceived need to get together in indoor settings. And, there are no traditional gathering holidays in front of us until Easter. So I think this combination of factors means that we’ll see a decline in infection rates over the next three months.
There are of course caveats to my optimism. If the issues with vaccine supply continue or get worse, if people’s optimism leads them to reducing precautions or if the new variants are indeed significantly more infectious than the rate of decline might slow. If a number of these things come to pass, this may not be our last peak.
Wear a mask, socially distant and if able, get vaccinated.
So a new little writing experiment for the blog. I’ve been wanting to find a way to do some free writing as practice. And I’ve been wanting to capture the moments in my life that have brought me true happiness. I need that little pick me up right now with everything going on in the world and no real chance to travel. So, some writing about happy moments in my life, hope they bring you a little happiness too.
A couple of years ago I moved to Oaxaca City, Mexico for three months. I went to Oaxaca for several reasons. I wanted to do a few weeks of Spanish language skill, I wanted to live in another country for a time, I wanted to check out Oaxaca as a potential retirement location and finally, I was excited to be in Mexico for the Day of the Dead celebration.
My time in Oaxaca was wonderful. The language school experience was wonderful, I loved my little apartment, the weather and city were spectacular and the Day of the Dead celebrations were fascinating. Two things really stood out in Oaxaca, the tremendous amount of art that was present everywhere and the absolutely amazing food that was also available everywhere. On top of the quality, given the economy, the price of the food is insanely inexpensive. Across from my apartment was a little place called Tacos Roy. At Tacos Roy, I could get my favorite type of tacos, a plate of 3 tacos al pastore as well as a bottle of coke for the equivalent of about $1.80 American. Street tamales sold by the little old ladies in the neighborhood were the equivalent of a quarter American and they were fantastic.
Oaxaca is also known for queso Oaxaca which is a type of mozzarella made and sold in Oaxaca that you can find everywhere in Mexico and also in the US. I ate many plates of enchiladas rojas and verdes con queso Oaxaca.
One of the things that I also fell in love with in Oaxaca were sweet tamales. The tamales are actually wrapped in banana leaves not corn husks.
But without a doubt the best meal I had in Oaxaca and one of the best meals of my life was at a restaurant aptly named Casa Oaxaca. They have a great menu full of local ingredients with interesting and amazing dishes. What always makes for a great meal is good company, a great location and of course amazing food. First, it was a beautiful night and we were dining outside on the rooftop patio of the restaurant overlooking the major cathedral in Oaxaca. I was dining with three women who I was taking Spanish language courses with and it was the last night for a couple of them, so the company was excellent. Finally, the food was absolutely spectacular. The appetizers were exotic and tasty including a ground fish and ant pate. The entrees were unbelievable, Oaxaca is known for it’s moles and my dinner choice was a chicken with an almond mole. I will tell you right now, there are a dizzy array of different moles in available in Oaxaca, but the almond mole was so incredibly good I would drink it by the glassful if offered that way. My friends tried various dishes including a molcajete bowl which is served in a soup/stew served in a stone bowl. The entire dinner, appetizers, drinks, entrees, deserts and tip would come to a little over $100 for the four of us. The same, at the same quality in San Francisco or New York would have easily been $500.
While dinner itself was great, when desert came out we were absolutely blown away. Casa Oaxaca uses local ingredients and southern Mexico offers a wide range of fruits and edible flowers to use in their dishes and deserts. I ordered a guava tart with rose petals and vanilla ice cream.
It was every bit of tasty as it was beautiful. All of the deserts were magnificent and the whole meal was truly long series of happiness moments. I leave you with a couple images of our deserts.
A slower pace of life can make you happy
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. ~ Bertrand Russell
What is life but time. We know this inherently when we talk about the things we care about, we always talk about time spent with family or friends. That time we did something or went somewhere. Time is also our most precious resource, it is the one thing we cannot manufacture more of. We know this inherently as well, for people that we love, who we have lost, we often talk about what we would be willing to give for just one more day with them, one more word, one more chance to hold them.
But humans by nature are paradoxical animals and as much as we may inherently know that time is a precious resource we often act as if it isn’t. We wait, god how we wait before doing things. We call it procrastination so it doesn’t sound so bad but we do far too much of it. All of us have waited before letting someone know how we feel, waited before starting that degree or changing jobs or getting out of a bad relationship. One of the things I do in order to battle against our natural tendency to procrastinate is to remind myself of the very precious nature of time and how fast it can go by. That reminder often is enough to push me into action.
During the pandemic I found myself just wasting time. Essentially I would work and then just sit down, relatively mindlessly in front of the television for the rest of the night. Now, I’m not one of those TV is bad people, I’m a TV watcher. After the end of the day, when I’ve done all of the things I want and need to do, I thoroughly enjoy watching an hour or two of good quality TV. It allows me to be entertained, and to relax in a relatively mindless way. One of my biggest issues is difficulty in slowing my mind down, TV allows me to do that in a way that is satisfying. So if I’m taking time at the end of the day to watch a quality TV show that’s productively using my time. When I’m tolerating mediocre TV just to have something to watch, well that’s actually wasting time. It was this realization and reminding myself about my precious and limited time that snapped me out of my funk and got me moving back to using my time more productively.
So what am I saying, that we should all work like dogs every waking moment of our life? Absolutely not. To be very clear what I’m pushing when I say be productive is that I believe we need to be purposeful in how we use our time. Make sure that the way you use your time accomplishes something that you need. The obvious things in that are things like taking care of your family, your relationships, building your wealth, your health, doing things that will improve your quality or quantity of work, even your side-hustles. But relaxation is also something you need, entertainment is also something you need. So purposeful relaxation is a productive use of your time. As the quote above says, time you enjoyed wasting, is not wasted time. I love this quote, I love the sentiment, I love that within the quote there is this judgement of what wasted time is, but that the quote also says that, that particular judgment doesn’t matter. Remember, it is you who determines whether or not what you are doing is unproductive or wasted time, not others.
So my friends, find ways to make your time productive even if it’s just to relax. If you are thoughtful about what you do, you won’t wasted your precious time and you’ll have happier days. ~ Rev Kane
If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody. ~ Rev Kane
Happiness is a decision we make for ourselves, but it is certainly easier to be happy if you are around happy people. The way I best relate this to them is to ask them to think about what it was like when they were a child. To think back to when they were a child and their parents were fighting, I ask if they remember the way they felt, that knot in their stomach. I also ask them to think about when their parents were happy and having fun and to think about how they felt then. It’s the best way I know to illustrate the raw power and impact of being around other happy people.
Being happy is a reward on it’s own, but being happy also helps make the people around you happy, whether that is family, friends or coworkers. But what are the specific benefits to you of being happy beyond just feeling better. From an article about the benefits of being happy, we know several things. From studies they found that people who are happy have the following benefits related to their happiness.
First, you need to get back to basics
I’ve talked about these in more in my post, getting back to basics. The second thing of course is to stretch yourself, to get yourself out of your comfort zone so that you can experience things that will truly help change you.
The first thing I would do is to refer you to the quote above, the surest, fastest way to feel better about yourself is to help others. So there’s a good formula to helping the people you are around be happy. First, work on being happy yourself. Then, find ways to help others by showing kindness. Studies show that, giving makes you happier because it stimulates the same center of the brain that responds to food and sex. So you can make your colleagues happier by doing things with or for the people you work with. This means that things like volunteering with your co-workers is a way to build more happiness in all of you.
Giving doesn’t have to be something grand, you don’t have to go build a house with Habitat for Humanity or anything that big. Small acts of kindness and yes, to be cliche, random acts of kindness can have a huge impact on people. What sorts of things am I talking about? A simple smile or a hello, a small compliment and for people you know a simple hug, the act of caring human contact has more of an impact than you can imagine. At work, something a college I worked for did, was to allow people to nominate co-workers for a thank you. A small group of folks would show up in their office with a small gift and a balloon and just let them know that they are appreciated. A small but powerful thing.
So, one more reason for being happy is that it helps make the people around you happy too and that will always make for a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Believe in yourself to be happy
Fear is killing your happiness
Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there ~ Will Rogers
So in today’s tour around the web I went to check out Mind Body Green, a friend recently turned me on to the site and much like some of my other favorites like Zen Habits and the Tiny Buddha it’s chock full of good pieces. So I sorted through some of the ones that specifically related to living a happy and fulfilled life. So take a look and have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
Twelve things you should do every week
Six ways to create your own happiness
Fourteen Mantras To Help You Build Positive Self-Talk
Four steps to stop worrying about what people think about you
Fifteen essential truths for a beautiful life
You can’t wrap love in a box, but you can wrap a person in a hug. ~Author Unknown
Hello friends, I just recently returned from my latest to trip to Burning Man in the Nevada Desert. I’m still decompressing from the experience and there will be much more to write about and many images to share over the next couple of weeks. Right now however I’m sliding through the transition phase from the Burning Man world to what burners call the default world. There’s a natural dip that occurs when you come back into the world and one of the key factors is human contact.
At Burning Man, on the Playa people rarely shake hands when they meet, the custom is to hug. So during that week in the desert you get far more hugs than normal. This raises your mood and makes you feel better about yourself and quite frankly humanity in general. So I’m sitting here tonight writing this piece wishing for a nice big hug to make me feel better and the thing is, if there is someone near you right now, they’re in need of one as well. So get up and go over there and give them a great big hug and you’ll both feel better and have a happy day my friends ~ Rev Kane
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