“Contentment is the only real wealth. – Alfred Nobel”

Hello all, hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are living up to your New Year Resolutions.  Hope to start blogging again soon but am going through a separation at the moment with all its upheaval.

May you find the balance.

It would be nice to report to you that I am following my own advice in attempting to reach a state of some contentment but it is more of a case of ‘do as i say not as i do’.  It is not to say that some half-hearted attempts have been made but I have to stop and stocktake.

The major problem is work.  Ever since I left the job in August I have been unable to stop working on my Mixed In Different Shades project which is providing me with hours and hours of fascinating pleasure doing things that I like doing like writing, web site management and web development.  Additionally not only am I learning lots about the subject matter, I am learning more about Internet marketing and advertising.  Add to this mix the compliments and new personal connections being made on a daily basis and this project has become more of an obsession.  Mentally the project serves me well.

Because I am spending so much time on the project I am procrastinating on some issues that I need to be dealing with now.  My wife and I are separating, luckily by mutual agreement, as my future plans and hers do not lend themselves to harmonious co-existence.  My youngest children are affected by this and deep down I know that this will be one of the hardest things I will ever have to go through.  I know emotionally I am not tackling this well, hiding behind the ‘I’m a man’ persona.  It sits there niggling me with the other related things that need doing like fixing up the house and putting it on the market, the negative market I must add that does not bode well for equity recovery.  Additionally, I am currently working full time on this project and living of savings but after the family move out to Africa, my financial situation is going to get a little scarier with the project not growing as fast as I would had hoped, my earnings have been miniscule so far.  I am not sure I am ready to deal with all this and missing my kids.  Emotionally I am in a little turmoil only made bearable by the emotional satisfaction of work.

The weight is not coming off and if I intend to do a lot of travelling for my project, I need to get fitter and thinner, no doubt about that.  In some of the places I intend to visit there is likely to be times when I need to move very quickly and waddling out of there might not just cut the ice.  I have reduced my refined carbohydrate intake quite substantially – which has helped before – and was exercising daily for a couple of weeks before I caught a cold quickly followed by doing my back in.  So no exercise for this fat boy for two or so weeks so far.  Whilst I find the reduced carb diet fairly easy to maintain especially since I am doing much more cooking – returning to an exercise routine takes a lot of effort to do – effort I prefer sticking into my project.  And yet I know I need to get fitter and thinner and it keeps niggling me.

Most of my thoughts when I am not physically working are on matters to do with my project.  I have thoughts, schemes and dreams of what I want to do and how it will turn out.  I have a lot of faith, with bouts of doubt and self-doubt,  that this will all work out in the end and me and mine will all be happier for it.  Spiritually I am very hopeful and uplifted.

Generally I would say I am fairly happy but I have these niggling issues that keep being swept to the back of my mind.  I know this is an illusion and if I do not regain some balance I am likely to become unstuck with issues that have grown due to lack of care.  So here it is, now that I have written about it, I have to do something about it, n’est pas?

BTW, I do intend to post more often and to try and stick to the subject of this blog though I may have to make a set commitment within my project timetable.  When I do start travelling, I will be keeping an eye out for things that will relate more to this blog than my project as I try and apply my contentment formula to different people in different societies – let’s just say this should make for some interesting posts.   Specifically, just how much does a sense of identity contribute to your happiness?

May you find the balance.

talking2myself wishes everyone a wonderful Christmas and a happy new year.

Tiger Wood story – can famous people escape it….

“Several psychoanalysts attribute déjà vu to simple fantasy or wish fulfillment, while some psychiatrists ascribe it to a mismatching in the brain that causes the brain to mistake the present for the past. Many parapsychologists believe it is related to a past-life experience. Obviously, there is more investigation to be done.” (http://www.howstuffworks.com/question657.htm)

The term déjà vu is French and means “already seen” and is sometimes called paramnesia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu). It is the feeling of familiarity with something that shouldn’t be familiar at all. The “previous” experience is usually attributed to a dream but sometimes experience fells like it actually happened in the past.

I am one of the ‘lucky’ people who experiences déjà vu occasionally no way as much as I used to when I was younger.  In at least one case I could attribute the feeling to a sort of ‘out of body’ dream/experience I had many years earlier.  In that case, I was looking of a photograph of an old colonial house in India – where I have never been to physically but have been to in my mind!  I had a lot of those ‘out of body’ experiences in my adolescence and early teenage years but that is a subject of another post.  Most of my experiences, I can point to dreams as the source but occasionally, I can’t even remember what caused the ‘previous’ experience.

Recently something that has never happened before with my déjà vu episodes.  I met an old friend in another city and we did a bit of shopping, had lunch and had a great walkabout the city with a few ‘re-fueling’ stops on the way, 14 years is a long time to catch up on.  Normally, I would have visited many more establishments but my friend is not much of a drinker.  I am quite happy finding a nice spot to view the world go by and sip on cold beers for a whole afternoon.  So by the evening, I was tired, just wanted to find somewhere to sit, have something to eat and we were still walking round in circles.

Anyway, I slipped into MacDonald’s to use the facilities and as I was in there, I had the great sense of having been in this situation, in this place, before, in a dream not a month old, before I knew I was going to meet up with this friend.  But now get this, I also knew that if I did not change my mood and handle the situation delicately, I might hurt my friendship.  Needless to say, I walked out and gently we steered ourselves to an eating establishment where I had my beer and I bought him dinner.  The jet-lag had kicked in so we called it a day with my dear friendship intact.

It made me wonder about dreams and déjà vu and I am still wondering.

May you find the balance.

Even the staid old scientists are getting into this popular culture thingy.  You can now take part in a scientific study of happiness with your iPhone – https://www.trackyourhappiness.org/.  Since this blog is about that very thing, I’m going to have a go, so watch this space, I may be the happiest person on the planet, NOT!