It's the little things

Being easy to please

Do you enjoy a new mug? I do. They say simple things please simple minds. Well my mind must be incredibly simple because I take a great deal of pleasure in small things like a new mug. It makes me happy to select it from the cupboard, to make the tea in it and to drink from it. I enjoy how it looks, how it feels in the hand. How silly of me I suppose. But then again, it makes me easy to please.

I once read something that talked about this idea, annoyingly, I can’t remember where. But the gist of it was that if you expect happiness to come from great adventures, fantastic achievements and exciting events, then you won’t spend a lot of time being happy. If you need to wait for a big holiday abroad, to get promoted or for your birthday celebrations to roll round, then happiness is being rationed. Not only are those types of thing infrequent, but they require a lot of planning and effort to bring about and are often not guaranteed even then. How often do we go out, intent on ‘having a good time’ and the evening falls flat?

Much better if your happiness can come from the small things in life, the moments, the incidental. If your happiness can come from enjoying stepping into a warm bath, curling up with a book, taking the first bite of a tea drenched biscuit, knitting a few stitches, looking up at a clear blue sky, or indeed - choosing a pretty mug to use. Well, then your happiness is limitless. You can fit dozens and dozens of little things like that into one day. You could squeeze one or two into a busy and relatively miserable day. Wouldn’t that be so much nicer? So much easier? So much more attainable?

“It's the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary.”

―Paulo Coelho

Of course, I don’t suppose we can engineer happiness but we can do things to help it along - food, exercise, sleep and such. But if we can look for, and notice it, in the small and the everyday, that could make a such difference too. We used to call it ‘taking pleasure in the little things’, now apparently they say it’s 'looking for glimmers’. That works well too, I like catching sight of these shiny flashes as I go about my day. Whatever you call it, it definitely makes a difference to me.

What small things make you happy?

S x

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