The Difference Between Fun and Happiness

I didn’t get a blog post done last weekend. I put in about 28 hours editing my book manuscript – before sending it off to the copy editor.  I had an ache in my neck and was going stir-crazy as the evening went on…and on. I finished on Sunday night around midnight and made a PDF copy to send in the morning… I dragged myself into the shower at 1 am for some hot water therapy.  I couldn’t have been happier. I was euphoric.

I was remembering an article a friend passed on to me in the late 80’s. It was called “The Secret to Real Happiness” and it really stuck with me. The author, Dennis Prager, talked about how some people equate real “happiness”  with “having fun”. He felt that they had little or nothing in common; nothing to do with each other.

Fun, he said, is what we experience during an act, and happiness is what we experience after an act – a much deeper, abiding emotion.

Sports activities, parties, watching movies are all fun activities that make us forget our troubles, make us laugh and help us de-stress. But they don’t contribute to real happiness because the fun ends when they end.

When we see celebrities and the mega rich partying, driving around in expensive cars, living in glamourous places we may think, “wow… wouldn’t that be nice – I’d be so happy” but memoir after memoir from these same people informs us that it is not necessarily so.

Believing that a fun-filled, pain-free life will bring happiness must then mean, conversely, that pain must bring unhappiness.  Typically this is not true. Quite often things that lead to happiness usually involve some pain.  And, by avoiding pain or struggle, we lose out on some of the greatest sources of happiness in life:  marriage, raising children, professional development and achievement, self-improvement, civic or charitable work.

I love to have fun, joking and laughing with friends, dancing, playing games, watching funny movies. But I know that these don’t contribute to my overall happiness.  Raising my son, being in relationships full of integrity, taking on challenging projects at work, and working on this book project…have brought me incredible amounts of happiness that continue to build.

Understanding this can liberate us…we may feel more generous with our time pursuing some of these tougher challenges,  we may be less pressured to spend on things that will not contribute to our happiness, and we may rid ourselves of any envy we have for those with lots of toys, money and a scintillating social life.

It helps us lead our life differently and can contribute to much satisfaction. This really helps me when I’m exhausted or when I have to tackle something that is really tough: whether it is speaking my truth or rolling up my sleeves in the office.

I have been working on the book for three years, plugging away doing photo shoots, writing, re-writing, designing and re-designing.  We are getting near the end, but this last bit is challenging, time consuming, a lot of work, and a lot of hours…

I’m amazed at the happiness it is already bringing: a sense of pride and accomplishment.  Similar to that amazing feeling when you reach the mountain summit on a long grinding hike, cross a marathon finish line, or graduate from a program.  Not always a lot of fun during the journey but oh, such joy and real happiness in the end.

Wish me luck. Another month of filling in the blanks, the last photos to shoot, copy edits, then a month of back and forth proofing before going to the printer in April.  Much happiness to come.

I’m Back…and on a mission

Yes, one can feel so confident when they start a new venture, or a new practice, and everything is going swimmingly.  I felt very smug last year when I seemed to have no problem writing a blog post twice a week. Others asked “how do you do it??”

“It’s easy…” I replied “…not a problem.”

Then life happens, throws you a few curve balls. I cringe when I see my last post was in the summer. Yep.  It happens.  Lots of things happen.  As Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in her beautiful book, The Faithful Gardener:  “Though we think we are following the rightful map…God suddenly decides to lift up the road and places it and us elsewhere.”

(I must digress: this is a fabulous little book, a story within a story, about a young tree in the forest who dreams of being chosen for a Christmas tree, and the wonderful life it imagines it will have. It’s a heartwarming, elegantly told tale about loss, survival and rebirth… I highly recommend it.)

This last year I have lost both my parents: my mother last Christmas, after six years in dementia care; a long, slow goodbye that ended with a brief illness and a few profound, beautiful days by her side at the end. My father, quickly and unexpectedly this summer; here one day, gone the next.  Two services, two lives to wrap up, two dealings with “the family”.

One of the more positive things that has taken me away is an abundance of great work. Lots of fabulous projects…too many almost…and I have found myself working 7 long days a week for the last six months. It does start to take its toll and it required me to drop pretty well everything else: social events, work on my book project, blogging, and taking care of myself.

I had a few days off at Thanksgiving and decided to set a beautiful table for a small dinner I was hosting. I launched into my old tried and true favorite past time of foraging for the dinner table. I decided on a colour, dug around in the pantry for dishes and linens – gold – and decided that the beautiful autumn leaves that were gracing the street would be the perfect finishing touch.  I went for a walk through the neighbourhood looking for the most vibrant golden trees and found plenty.

I came home, turned on some music and finished setting the table. I was overcome with a feeling of peace and total bliss…of “coming home”….I love doing this… I hadn’t done this for quite a while… I missed this!  How I missed playing and staging and entertaining and preparing.  It reminded me of how much I love this artful part of life.

The holiday passed, the workload continued. The cherished past times were abandoned once again.

Finally the deadlines, the deliverables, the bulk of the work is settling down. It had better…my health is suffering.  Too much…I need a break, I need a change, I need a rest. I need to reconnect to those artful pursuits again. As rewarding as my work is, as interesting, as challenging, and satisfying…I need to grab hold of those activities that most feed my soul and put joy in my heart.

Writing, creating art, entertaining, completing the labour of love that is my upcoming book; I am on a mission to bring these back into my life.  I hope to be here again, on a regular basis, to chronicle those joys, and write about the art part of my heart.

Book Journey: a story of three drafts

Writing a book has been everything I imagined it to be, and more. In my case, I think of it more as creating, rather than writing a book, since it has so many components and pieces.

Creating a book has always been on my “list” and as a designer and artist, I always knew it would be about design in some fashion, rather than a novel, for instance.

I imagine that writing a novel would be much tougher – having to create a really sound body of writing. My individual essays have seemed like they are simpler than that. They have been easier to gather and compile and tackle and manage – one at the time.  I guess the requirement for consistency is still there? There’s no plot development, but still, there is a need for cohesion throughout. In any case, I have truly enjoyed the writing of the essays about the artful, creative living experiences that accompany the photos I’ve pulled together.

I think that’s where is started…writing about those first few experiences, as the mother of a young son. Then the idea of gathering them all, in groups… I had some photos that needed writing to accompany them, and I also had some writing pieces that needed photos.  A spreadsheet started, and grew. It became an ever-evolving outline.

I added and deleted and switched and combined categories and topics.  Then they started to take hold, take shape, hang together.

I wrote and labelled and tagged. We started doing photo shoots and labelled and tagged according to the great big master spreadsheet.  There were months where there wasn’t much time to work on this project, and other months where I reveled in making good headway, in fruitful work.

Draft 1: Finally Real

I was still flying solo, without much professional help. I wanted to flush out the book and make it more concrete – I had to start somewhere.  It was not the right time to leap ahead and learn InDesign (the software that the book would need to be in, to be printed eventually). I wanted a quick fix and I wanted to start with a draft I could quickly pull together, to get a sense of things. So I used PowerPoint – some cringed, but, it was what I knew well and used in my work presentations.  It worked because it got me to get my material into a “book” format.

It went together quickly! A year ago, I printed it for the first time and wept. It was finally real.  After looking at slides on a computer screen for months and months it felt wonderfully different…and real.

 

Draft 2:  More Real

Fast forward another nine months…I now have a dozen photo shoots under my belt, have crossed off a lot of items on the spreadsheet and have also started working with a book designer. Fiona Raven is a huge help: as is her own book “Book Design Made Simple” that I refer to.  She helped me lay out the pages in InDesign which I have now learned to use…basically… (quite the learning curve!) and I’ve placed everything into this new, polished format. There are still a lot of holes, but it feels good moving on to the proper format, to standardized page layouts and sizing.  The book is taking shape even more, with chapter spreads and headings. The design is now refined and articulated.

 

DRAFT 3: Really Real

Here we are…right now… a third draft was printed off two weeks ago and sent off to the publishing consultants who will do a substantive edit and review of the manuscript.  I’ve put a lot of hours in since Draft 2 – filling in all the blanks, writing the last few pieces, finding those elusive photos, and creating placeholders for the last dozen.  I’ve laid out the front matter and the back matter. Now I know how many pages it will be in total.  I’ve written my acknowledgements, allowed for the table of contents, dedications, and index, tweaked the cover and the title…. Lots of polishing on the pages, aligning, sizing of photos, revisions of content, layout…  This feels amazing.

Behind the Book, my publishing consultants, will get back to me in another week or so…it will be interesting to hear what they have to say! After we sort through that, it will be time to tackle ISBN, dates at the printer, and an ambitious schedule to polish and get everything packaged for the printer.

I’m so excited and I’m hoping to stick to our deadlines in order to get this baby out by early October.  Wish me luck in this last leg of an amazing journey.

Stay tuned! I welcome you to sign up to my email list to be notified of the book release and launch celebrations, or follow this blog. I’ll be certain to spread the good news as soon as I can.

Happy 1st year, Art Part!

The Art Part of my Heart was born and my first blog post published one year ago. What a great experience it’s been. I didn’t know what to expect, how things would evolve. I’ve enjoyed writing and have slowly been crafting, honing that skill; it’s been enjoyable to express myself through this medium.

It has helped me find beauty and write about it. I’ve made seeing beauty a daily practice, this helps me keep up the momentum on Instagram where I try and post a photo daily – a little easier than writing.

When I look at my IG gallery – just reached 200 posts – I see this style, MY style, showing through. A consistency, a certain quality….I invite you to check it out! Same name, just add underscores: the_art_part_of_my_heart

When I look back on my 60-something blog posts here on WordPress, I feel a sense of pride. Some of my favorites are: Food for the Heart: 3 movies: one of my earlier blog posts about great foodie movies, Words to Live By: about my love of poetry, and Spicy Salty Sweet: a recipe for glazed nuts that everyone seems to love.   Long Live the Kingsway is about my commute some days to my client’s office on a historical iconic road, Mom, got any books I can read? takes a spin around my library shelves, and Mom-Son, Art-Heart: is about my son recognizing and “getting” what that phrase means….

I recently attended a Vancouver Writers Festival event called “Platforms”. We were treated to a relaxed, candid discussion with our guest authors: Elaine Lui, who is behind the extremely popular blog LaineyGossip.com, and Paige McKenzie, who’s YouTube Channel, The Haunting of Sunshine Girl, has had 150 million views. They have both recently written books (Elaine’s is about her mother and Chinese culture, and Paige’s is a companion book that follows her YouTube video series about a young girl and her experiences with paranormal activity in her Pacific Northwest home).

Of course audience members asked them: What is the secret to success? They answered as others have answered before: hard work, dedication, authenticity, consistency in delivering. I guess it really is one day at a time, one post at a time. One follower, one like…at a time.

Linda Lomelino, a fantastic young, creative Swedish cake maker and photographer/blogger, with 500,000 followers on Instagram, me included, posted recently about her 6^th anniversary doing what she does, saying: “I started six years ago with hardly any experience”…

Perhaps there’s hope for us all! Whatever you do, do what you love. Keep at it. I will too.

Book Just Got Real

I’ve been working on my book draft/mock up and managed to get most of it mapped out into a format that’s starting to take shape. I’ve been scrolling back and forth between the 200 or so pages on my computer screen for a few weeks now.

I decided it was time to print off a copy so I could hold it in my hands, see what the pages looked like beside each other and get a feel for sizing. I wanted to start to makes notes and edit it at another level.

When the 212 pages were printed and bound together the other day, I wept.

It finally felt like a book. It finally felt like a project that was going to come to fruition! I’ve been dreaming of this for a while and have been telling people about my progress over the last year as we tackled photo shoots, as the written work went through another round of edits…but this moment was such a huge milestone. Me, the one who loves paper books so much, the one that loves holding and touching books, magazines and reports in my hands instead of reading them on a screen….of course this was the moment.

I closed my eyes and hugged the package of pages, pressed them close to my heart, and told myself that this would happen, this was happening. This dream will come true.

The Book Beckons

It is very heady and exciting working on my book. Nearly 100 first draft essays have almost all been given a once-over again. Along with my enthusiastic and talented photographer Kathy, shown above, we’ve completed 10 photo shoots over the last year. Now it’s time to put it all together.

I’m working on a physical print mockup. I can see it completed in my head (most of my projects come to me as a photo in my mind of some kind of finished/complete thing…). I think it’s best now to create a mock up and start getting some advice on fine tuning – and make it more “real”.

I’ve said for many years: “There’s a book inside me”. Still it feels surreal that I am actually working on completing one….am I ??? I hope so! I do want to give birth to it, to see it complete. That is the first step. Where it goes from there? We’ll see. I battle with the two opposing voices in my head: the one that says: “Really? What do you have to say???” and the other: “Your ideas are fantastic!!!” As a lifelong writer said: we must put forth and write what is true to us. We are unique and wonderful as we are. Speak from the heart, speak your truth and share it fully, with an open heart.

I love the many facets of my creative life, and how I can appreciate the art and beauty we see around us daily – the sacred in the everyday. How nature’s designs are so exquisite, how we can create art with our food, our clothing, our gardens, our words, our voices…How we can share the sublime appreciation of all this with friends, family, partners….

Last week we were busy shooting all kinds of fill-in bits, and the power went out! It was pretty dark in the house, so we moved out to the front porch. The southern (albeit cloudy) sky was more than adequate to shoot my cousin Susan’s gorgeous floral painted silk scarf. Kathy has taught me so much about photographing in natural light – something she does almost exclusively. Things do look particularly beautiful (and natural!) in natural light.

Stay tuned as we head into the homestretch. I can’t wait to have more to report.