Have you made your new year resolutions? If not, try the following. Each is potentially life changing.
1. Give thanks. Once a day take quiet time to feel
gratitude for what you have, not impatience for what you don’t have.
This alone will bring you halfway to happiness. We already have most of
the ingredients of a happy life. It’s just that we tend to take these
for granted and focus on unmet wants, unfulfilled desires. Giving thanks
is better than shopping – and cheaper too.
2. Praise. Catch someone doing something right and
say so. Most people, most of the time, are unappreciated. Being
recognised, thanked and congratulated by someone else is one of the most
empowering things that can happen to us. So don’t wait for someone to
do it for you: do it for someone else. You will make their day, and that
will help to make yours.
3. Spend time with your family. Make sure that there
is at least one time a week when you sit down to have a meal together
with no distractions – no television, no phone, no e-mail, just being
together and celebrating one another’s company. Happy marriages and
healthy families need dedicated time.
4. Discover meaning. Take time out, once in a while,
to ask: “Why am I here? What do I hope to achieve? How best can I use
my gifts? What would I wish to be said about me when I am no longer
here?” Finding meaning is essential to a fulfilled life – and how can
you find it if you never look? If you don’t know where you want to be,
you will never get there, however fast you run.
5. Live your values. Most of us believe in high
ideals, but we act on them only sporadically. The best thing to do is to
establish habits that get us to enact those ideals daily. This is
called ritual, and it is what religions remember but ethicists often
forget.
6. Forgive. This is the emotional equivalent of
losing excess weight. Life is too short to bear a grudge or seek
revenge. Forgiving someone is good for them but even better for you. The
bad has happened. It won’t be made better by your dwelling on it. Let
it go. Move on.
7. Keep learning. I learnt this from Florence in
Newcastle, whom I last met the day she celebrated her 105th birthday.
She was still full of energy and fun. “What’s the secret?” I asked her.
“Never be afraid to learn something new,” she said. Then I realised that
if you are willing to learn, you can be 105 and still young. If you are
not, you can be 25 and already old.
8. Learn to listen. Often in conversation we spend
half our time thinking of what we want to say next instead of paying
attention to what the other person is saying. Listening is one of the
greatest gifts we can give to someone else. It means that we are open to
them, that we take them seriously and that we accept graciously their
gift of words.
9. Create moments of silence in the soul. Liberate
yourself, if only five minutes daily, from the tyranny of technology,
the mobile phone, the laptop and all the other electronic intruders, and
just inhale the heady air of existence, the joy of being.
10. Transform suffering. When bad things happen, use
them to sensitise you to the pain of others. The greatest people I know
– people who survived tragedy and became stronger as a result – did not
ask “Who did this to me?” Instead, they asked “What does this allow me
to do that I could not have done before?” They refused to become victims
of circumstance. They became, instead, agents of hope.
Most of these are, of course, integral elements of a religious life,
which may be why so many surveys have shown that those who practise a
religious faith tend to live longer, have lower levels of stress and
report higher degrees of wellbeing than others. This is not accidental.
The great religions are our richest treasuries of wisdom when it comes
to the question of how best to live a life.
Life is too full of blessings to waste time and attention on
artificial substitutes. Live, give, forgive, celebrate and praise: these
are still the best ways of making a blessing over life, thereby turning
life into a blessing.
(First published in The Times, January 2008)
