my happy place, originally uploaded by pstarr
Do you want to be happy? Gretchen at The Happiness Project recommends practical methods for capturing happiness in daily life. One of these is the concept of personal "commandments," a list of basic, high-level rules that you voluntarily choose to follow. They are, as Gretchen puts it, "precepts that I want to guide my actions and thoughts."
Here are my eight commandments, not necessarily for happiness only, but for life in general:
- Love God.
- Love others.
- Take time to listen.
- Live now.
- Calm down.
- Create.
- Go outside.
- Simplify.
I might go into more detail on some or all of these in the future. If you think that such a list--or at least the exercise of creating one--might be useful to you, here are six tips for designing your own happiness commandments.