La Bella Vita

I am the architect of my own happiness. ♥

Aiming for La Bella Vita 

IDLENESS SHRIVELS HAPINESS

La bella vita is an Italian expression that most nearly means “the beautiful life” in English. For those of you out there who do not speak Italian, you probably feel cool when you use this expression. (I know I do). Nevertheless, I have come across this expression on many occasions, but I have only actually used it twice: once to entitle a vision board that I made a year ago and again today.

A couple of days ago, this particular expression struck me like a lightning bolt. Okay, let me not exaggerate. It was more like one of those orgasmic “light bulb” moments. :) Anyways, as I considered using it in my next blog entry, I couldn’t help but enter a brief moment of reflection. I made two important realizations: firstly, that la bella vita is happiness and secondly that I was sleepwalking through what could be my own bella vita. Rats! How could I, right? Well it was simple—I had flipped the autopilot switch in my life. I wasn’t immobile; I just wasn’t active. Life had become a procedure that I had to bear with—not live through. In short, I was alive but not living.

You know you have become a zombie when everything in your life becomes monotone, when everyday becomes a “full circle and back again” nightmare—when you have lost the urge to bring that “zing” back into your life. I label this as but one thing: idleness. If complacency is the handicap to happiness, than idleness is its blight. To be idle is to succumb to laziness and I came to understand that it does nothing if not shrivel happiness.

MY STORY

I spent the entire month of March being idle and this is how I was certain of it: I had simply let go. I caved in to everything I would have otherwise resisted and became a walking, taking over-indulger. I committed five unforgivable sins: (1) I procrastinated to a degree that, in my book, should have been illegal; (2) I ate way too many Snickers, to a point where I probably sold Caribbean out of its Snickers stock (ok, maybe I’m exaggerating); (3) I watched more television than necessary; (4) I read fewer books; and (5) I flat out abandoned my exercise routine. Now, to be fair, I had just suffered from two consecutive muscle spasms followed by a merciless muscle pull. But who am I to make excuses! I was losing my grip. The thing about me, however, is that I get itchy—really itchy—when I essentially stop moving. And so during that period, I was haunted by a toxic feeling of malaise. I was ill at ease and whatever sense of satisfaction I had before dissipated. Poof! Gone. With that, three of my most detrimental demons came knocking: (1) insecurity, (2) anxiety, and (3) discouragement. They devoured me and I sank further into dullness. As much as I wanted to blame it on my muscles and their need for potassium and calcium, I knew deep inside what my problem was: I needed a break, and so I loosened my reigns only to feel disappointed in myself.

ATTITUDE: THE SECRET WEAPON

“The days are long, but the years are short,” says Gretchen. Well, it turns out that the months are even shorter. In the blink of an eye, four weeks had gone by, and although my muscles were recovering, I was still in a funk. That is when I came across the following quote: “I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.” Charles Swindoll. Bam! It hit me. ATTITUDE. If happiness was the gateway to la bella vita, than attitude was the key. During the month of March, I had forsaken that key for something better—a self-destruct button. (How wonderfully foolish of me, I know.) As opposed to taking action to remove myself from my idle-zone, I had given in to negative emotion—and it drained me of my energy. While everyone in my surroundings was moving forward, I was just sitting on a stone next to the path of my life. And when I finally stood up, I began to sleepwalk aimlessly through my daily tasks. Now that I had discovered my way out, I knew what I needed to do: I needed to renew my sense of vitality. It turns out an attitude makeover was precisely the solution to my problems because a week later, guess what I encountered. Yes! The Happiness Project.

I set out to define attitude further and reading The Happiness Project provided me with considerable insight. Here is what I came up with.

Attitude is a manner of addressing something according to the way you feel about that particular thing. More importantly, it is an approach for handling anything that life throws at you, be it good or bad, and can lead to one of two outcomes—self-construction or self-destruction.

When it comes to the building blocks of happiness, no component plays a more integral role than attitude. Attitude is the glue that binds together the different pieces in a happiness project. When you think of it, everything that you face in your daily life elicits a reaction of you. Whether this applies to your relationships with your friends and family, to your schoolwork, and even to your leisurely activities, the ways in which you choose to react are shaped by the attitudes you take towards different aspects of your life. Now this attitude can either be good or bad, which is what will determine if your surroundings will respond to you in a negative or positive way. And herein lies the power you wield in the action-reaction chain of life.

GRETCHEN’S ATTITUDE SHIFT

In her happiness project, Gretchen’s initial step was to redesign her attitude towards key realms in her daily life that affected her happiness, namely her marriage, her children, her work, and even her leisure. While reading these chapters I found it difficult to relate to Gretchen in certain respects, such as in her relationship with her husband. In order to grasp what she was attempting to say, I tried to zoom out of the specifics of her life in order to examine her overarching message from an “aerial” point of view and, more importantly, apply it to my life. Gretchen’s fundamental shift was in her attitude. By acquiring a more positive outlook towards all the things that constituted her life—“boomerang errands,” familial duties, absurd arguments—she was able to reframe the way in which she not only regarded but reacted to situations when they arose. Be they good or bad, she embraced everything that made her life her life and learned to be happy in the midst of all these elements. Here is my favorite of her splendid truths that wraps all of these principles in one:

To be happy, one needs to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

I was the author of my life, and I could either make it a sob story or a delightful one. I understood what Gretchen meant when she said, “The days are long, but the years are short.” The days feel long because, sometimes, we design them to be that way. We drag them out the moment we wake up dreading all of the unbearable things we will have to face that day. Nothing is enjoyable and everything becomes work. The years are short because when we spend so much time tuned into pessimism, we become so preoccupied with feeling ill at ease or frustrated or dull, that we forget to look past our negativity and to take part in the growth, in the happiness that prevails around us. We should not let the years outrun us. We should learn to go along for the ride.

MATHILDE’S FIRST SPLENDID TRUTH

So with all of this newly gained knowledge and understanding, what have I identified as my “splendid truth?” Well here it is:

Taking one step at a time towards happiness is directly proportional to taking one step at a time towards la bella vita—and the second one stops to do this, life stops being beautiful and starts being dry.

Idleness is a poison. Attitude is the cure.

-Sign MAPL∞