Ninety Degrees of Separation (from Happiness)
Posted on 25 January 2010
Last week, I was looking for easy ways to be happier.
Simple changes. Things that don’t require a prescription.
No, I’m not depressed (although my sleep patterns might say otherwise). I’m doing research for an article on… you guessed it!… easy ways to be happier. And I found quite a few.
Apparently, little things like making your bed every morning or watching less TV can boost happiness.
But I wanted something I might actually try. So I asked around, and my best friend I’ve never met had an intriguing suggestion: rearrange the furniture.
And I ended up testing her theory. Kind of by accident though.
While disposing of our way-past-its-due-date Christmas tree, Daniel and I stumbled upon a practically unused, beautiful white dresser that one of my neighbors was trying to dispose of. So beautiful, in fact, I already owned the exact same one in dark brown. I’d paid several hundred dollars for it, and he was just giving it away. One man’s trash…
We couldn’t believe our luck.
So we offered to take it off his hands, knowing full well we hardly had space for another refrigerator magnet, let alone a five-foot-something-wide dresser. But free is free. And we desperately need storage. We were going to make it fit if we had to suspend it from the ceiling.
Hoping we wouldn’t have to go that far, we thought about ways to rearrange the furniture to accommodate this monster. So we turned the couch ninety degrees to the left.
Small change, huge impact.
Now, I’m not one to believe in Feng Shui—hell, I can barely pronounce it—but there’s definitely something different about the vibe at home since we rearranged.
We’re laughing more. Food tastes better. Colors seem… brighter.
Okay, not really. But we do seem to be enjoying the living space so much more. All it took was a ninety degree rotation. And an imposing white dresser.
Now if I could just start making my bed in the morning. Because when I come down from this high, I’m gonna want to rearrange the furniture again. And there’s not a whole lot we can do at this point without heavy duty cables and some ceiling hooks.
5 responses to Ninety Degrees of Separation (from Happiness)
Please make the bed in the morning!
You know that will never happen.
Change is definitely a great way to bring a new, happier, experience into your life.
I have found a couple of others.
1. Write 10 things that you are grateful for each morning.
2. Remember 1 (or more) person that you did something good for during the day without expecting something in return.
3. Give away a dollar anonymously (hide it somewhere) and imagine the reaction when someone finds it during the day.
Have Fun
Dave
Thanks Dave! I like the idea of writing down ten things every day—it’s so easy to inflate the negative and ignore the positives in life.
i LOVE that dresser. BAH. So lucky.