Life is hard and takes a lot out of us each day. It is like a leaky bucket. Since we all know this, we should try to fill our bucket with moments of happiness each and every day.
Haiku:
a leaky bucket
needs to be refilled all day
like our happiness
Life is hard, it’s like a leaky bucket -- we need to fill up our happiness every day.
Hello -- Marc with the Gunnar Project. Again, the mission of the Gunnar Project is to inspire and teach people how to pursue happiness -- and certainly happiness has a lot to do with just life.
I want to give an illustration -- one illustration of life that you hear a lot and see a lot written in different books and in different articles, and I think it’s a great idea, a great thing to look at as far as you look at life -- the analogy that is used a lot of times is that life is sort of a little bit like a leaky bucket. What I mean by that is: if you get a good night’s sleep, get up, get some good breakfast, when you start your day -- your day is like a bucket, and it’s full -- it’s full of happiness and you’re ready to go out and you have a lot of energy and you’re ready to go out and kind of approach your day.
But life is sort of hard, right? Life through the course of a day typically kicks us in the teeth a couple of times. We’re driving on our way to work and we run into some rush hour traffic, and somebody cuts us off and there’s just all these little things that just sort of take a little bit out of that bucket. And then you show up at work, and you have a pile of work that you have to do, and you might have a crabby customer or something… or you show up at school and there’s a test that you have to take, and you’re not perfectly ready for it, and it just takes a little bit out of your bucket, and through the course of the day, things just come up and they’re things that are somewhat sometimes in our control and sometimes completely out of our control, but they’re not always perfect. They’re constantly sort of taking things out of the bucket.
And what ends up happening at the end of the day, if you haven’t put anything else back in the bucket, by the end of the day, you can feel pretty worn-out! There are just some of those days where you just want to go home and don’t want to do anything -- just want to plop down and get something to eat and hang out in front of the TV and just veg and chill. I think that we have all had those days.
The point is -- if you knew this about life, and you address that, you would know that through the course of the day, you need to be actively putting things back in your bucket. You need to make sure that you eat good -- and you eat healthy things, so that you replace some of that energy through the course of the day. You can avoid getting caught in rush hour traffic and being late, if that’s one of the things you do, by leaving a little bit more early, giving yourself some time where you can just sort of chill -- turn on some cool music and just kind of go with the rush-hour traffic. If you’ve left plenty of time on the front side of this, it doesn’t make any difference anyway.
You can avoid talking to those people at your office, or at class, or in your dorm room or whatever who upset you and make you unhappy -- you can replace these things -- you can just a moment and step outside and say “Ah! Man! What a glorious day! What beautiful sunshine!” You can be thankful for different things and be very grateful -- which we all know makes us feel good and puts a little bit more back in that bucket.
If you were actively putting things back in your bucket every day, at the end of the day, your bucket is going to be full and you’re going to feel really good at 5:00pm -- you’re not going to just veg out and grab a bag of potato chips and sit on the couch and watch TV -- you might go for a run, you might go workout, you might go to a play or something that’s going to stimulate you a little bit, right? And when you’re ready for bed that night, you don’t have all these things -- these dark clouds that are kind of hanging out there, you crushed the day, man, and your bucket is full and you’re ready and you’re going to sleep well and not have things that are rolling around and annoying and waking you up and not allowing you to sleep very well.
So, again, this idea that life is hard -- we all know it -- and it’s going to kind of kick us around a little bit through the course of the day. If we know that -- we can actively engage in putting stuff back in our bucket and end up at the end of the day still full of energy and still feeling great about what’s happened.
Again, Marc with the Gunnar Project -- thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye.