step back, pause and see happiness

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Our lives are filled with sources of happiness, but we tend to walk past most of this through our days. We need to stop, step back and pause for a moment to see the happiness in right now in this moment.

Haiku:

the moment becomes

clear when we step back to see

different perspectives

Step Back, Pause and See Happiness

Hello -- Marc with the Gunnar Project -- again, the mission of the Gunnar Project, is to inspire and teach people, especially young adults, to pursue happiness every day.  

I want to talk about a technique that is very important to this idea of pursuing happiness.  We’ve talked a little bit about the fact that life is hard and life is a little bit like a leaky bucket where you’ll just run into things during the course of the day that sort of suck a little bit of the life out of you, right, and you need to, through the course of the day, you need to continually put stuff back in your bucket -- there are a bunch of things that we walk by every single day, that are sources of happiness, or potential sources of happiness, that we just don’t take the moment, to really look and see, and get that little shot of happiness that’s out there for us to be had: sunsets, birds singing, children playing in a park -- I mean there’s so many things, that we have a little bit of a tendency to put our blinders on, and just sort of walk by these things.

This concept that I want to talk about -- the skill that you actually need to develop: I call it Step Back and it’s really very simple -- you step back and kind of step back out of a situation, pause for a moment, and just look at all of the potential things that are in front of you right now, that are potential sources of happiness.  It could be a really cool -- again, the sun shining off a body of water, it could be the wind blowing in the trees, it could be kids playing in the park -- just all kinds of different things -- the smell of coffee as you walk into a coffee shop, the way a store clerk interacts with and really truly cares for the customer that he or she is helping at the moment.  There’s all of these things that we can step back -- if we just took a step back and looked -- we could step back and say “Ah!  That’s so cool! Oh wow! Look at that!”  

We need to become that seer -- the seer is the person that sees things that other people don’t see.  A lot of times we just sort of dive in, and we’re so involved in our life we let these things just they just keep passing by us, and there’s so many really cool things like that, that could be sources of happiness for us, that we just sort of let go by.  We need to develop the skill of taking a Step Back and just observing for a second and taking in all of the different things through the course of the day through the course of our life, so again I think this is a skill that all of us need to develop this idea stepping back looking to see what’s going on in my environment, grasping onto those things that are going to really truly generate some happiness for me and then jumping back in and getting back into my day and pursuing the rest of life as it would be that day.  

Marc with the Gunnar Project -- thank you much! Bye.