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Sustaining Happiness

Just discovered a link to Citizen Agency when I poked my head in over at Dave Seah’s place (Hi Dave!). Citizen Agency focuses on “changing the world through empowering individuals”. What I also found interesting though, and what Dave found interesting as well, is one of their recent posts entitled Looking over the CA horizon into 2007 in which they discuss their new focus on happiness.

Looking over the horizon of 2007, we got really introspective. During xmas and right before NYE, Chris and I spent some time on the east coast at his parents place in New Hampshire. We were offline and had lots of time to talk and hear ourselves think. And, I’ll tell you what:

It was amazing.

At one point, we were sitting back, taking in the quiet and I thought to myself, “I want more of this.”

Of course when you return to the everyday grind, things get back to being stressed again (as they experienced) but they figured out some ways to get that happiness back and in addition wrote out a promise to themselves to help sustain this happiness. What stood out for me in the quote above though are the few words of “hear ourselves think”. This reminded me of an interesting show I watched the other day on spiritual mediums in which one of the mediums, an elderly lady from Vancouver, said something to the effect of “People don’t sit and listen as much as they used to which is a shame.”

Now she didn’t mean sit and listen to other people. She meant sit and listen to yourself, your inner voice. Of course that’s part of the problem today is that we are being mentally bombarded by so many things, that it’s difficult to even hear our own wants and desires versus the desires being pushed at us by the various mediums of advertising. Therefore, if you get the chance to get away from it at all, as they did at Citizen Agency, you suddenly start hearing your inner voice again and things become suddenly clearer. Put another way, seek your happiness, not happiness defined by someone else.

And yes Dave’s right. This is “a missing piece of the puzzle”. But I think all you need to do is look at the core values of what Citizen Agency believes in and I think you’ll start seeing the bigger picture. Again we have a group of individuals collectively pushing their own cultural values as to what they believe is important, even though those values may go against the normalcy of business today. Why go against the flow? Because the flow is changing.

2 replies on “Sustaining Happiness”

Quite true Chris (and a great read). The more you pursue something and focus your attention on it, the more you lose sight of what you already have. Often times happiness is right under your nose. You just have to stop and recognize it for what it is.