Project Happiness Articles — empowerment

It occurred to me after this conversation that I’ve been building my own cathedral; engaged and working with purpose toward the bigger picture for a long time, with each and every brick a necessary part of something significant.

I now see my life with only physical limitations. I can write in bed even if it’s a paragraph at a time. I want to succeed, but this time I will do it. No more being scared of the future. Cancer is often the hardest thing people go through. But the way I see it, feeling negative with cancer will only make you feel worse.

These occasional feelings of apprehension about our future distract us from our authentic journey. What can we do when we feel this way? If this is where you are at, bring your focus back to the moment. Norman Fischer tells us, “No matter how much or how little we're doing, we're always just doing what we're doing, simply living this one moment of our lives.”

I’m talking about the fear that unfailingly comes up every single time we set out to do something expansive, something enriching that’s out of our comfort zone, and that likely even calls to us and inspires us. That’s where COURAGE comes in. Courage is the ability to meet our fear and to overcome it, to show up and take action, despite it.

I think about that afternoon when we played touch football in the park, with winter fast approaching. I remember the smile on my brother’s face. How he did the best with what he had and how it was enough. How it can always be enough, if we learn to accept it.

Regardless of my ‘over-achiever’ personality and how proud I should be, I would doubt everything constantly. Travelling taught me that I would still doubt life choices and push myself more than I could handle at times. Travelling solo taught me how to deal with these situations, take a step back, breath, smile and appreciate all the little things, which are essentially the bigger things.

I was bullied and I never told anybody about it. Yep. I kept it to myself as if it was a best kept secret. It was as if I had to deal with it alone because that’s just the kind of kid I was. Those experiences with being bullied influenced my self esteem more than I ever knew.

I like it because you can embark on whatever you wish. How delightful it would be if we all, instead of "having to do", " should get done" or "must finish", we simply embarked on every day, every task, every thing as though we were compelled by this work to simply journey without necessarily knowing the ending.

Project Happiness all started around the dinner table, when Randy's teenage daughter look at her and said, "I want to be happy, but I don't know...how." It rocked Randy to her core. She asked herself, "Where were the resources, how many more were suffering, and why are we not talking about this?"

Facing mental health issues leaves you caught in the headlights. It strips you of everything you think is essential and forces you to reevaluate your life, and that's what has happened to me. Crazy, I know, but thats how my issues with mental health can alter my thinking. And yet I am not my illness, and every day I strive to take up the challenge to celebrate life for all that it is.