Happy For No Earthly Reason

At first I thought I'd dedicate this week to different stories, examples, whatever, of decluttering, which has been proven to raise happiness levels all over. Also because I actually taped an interview with my friend Theresa, who has been decluttering for a 18 months now and described in detail how to do it, sending me hurtling to Ikea to get some necessaries like two boxes (to transfer my journals into from my filing cabinet which they have actually broken and a shoe organizer). I know, I know...it's lame but it's a start.

Anyways, I was reading Patrick Miller's Living with Miracles and decided instead to dedicate this week to forgiveness...which is sort of what I need to learn more. Yeah, my surroundings are a tip, but I figure, the mess outside is reflective of the mess inside.

So here is an excerpt from the book I'm reading, which is based on A Course in Miracles. Enjoy! (Actually on re-reading the quote I realise it has nothing to do with forgiveness...not obviously, unless you know the back story which leads to this state of mind...but never mind, I'm featuring it anyway)

David (Hoffmeister) concludes that "there's a correlation between the happy dream and the absence of expectations. Even mild expectations or subtle agendas of control, wanting a certain outcome to any degree, will block the happy dream from awareness. A sense of ongoing wonderment and innocence is what I've experienced. You finally yield to the simple idea of peace of mind now as the only goal worth having. This is very alien to our usual way of thinking, because we're used to setting a lot of goals that are all related to the future. But the happy dream has nothing to do with the future. It's finding peace now as a way of being, rather than something to be achieved someday after a lot of effort to arrange the right circumstances in order to feel peaceful.

"I once heard this kind of peace described as 'being happy for no earthly reason'," David Muses. That sums it up pretty well for me."