Color Your Life Happy

How are you going to celebrate April 6, National Twinkie Day?

What? You don’t have plans?

How about using this nontraditional celebration to send a surprise gift to someone you know?

Here are some more fun ideas:

• Provide a basket full of Twinkies for your staff of with an appropriate greeting.
• Deliver Twinkies to your best clients thanking them for their loyalty.
• Email recipes to your friends for different ways to add even more calories to Twinkies. There are lots of them on the Internet
• Host a cookoff to see who can come up with the best recipe using Twinkies.
• Play a trivia game with friends about the part Twinkies have played in legal history.
• Play floor hockey with frozen Twinkies.

Anyone can celebrate the traditional holidays. Celebrating nontraditional holidays is fun, and there’s no shortage of them year-round.

“A slow death comes for those who don’t revolt when they’re unhappy in their work or in love. Who don’t risk the certain for the uncertain in order to follow a dream. Who don’t allow themselves, at least once in their life, to disregard sensible advice.” –Pablo Neruda

Taking sensible advice is what most of us were raised to do.

• Finish your dinner
• Get a good job
• Don’t talk to strangers
• Be satisfied
• Don’t travel abroad, it’s not safe

Although good advice is well-intentioned, following it does not always lead to personal happiness.

• Finishing your dinner can lead to overeating, heartburn and obesity.
• Getting a good job that bores and stresses does not build character, just more upset.
• As for strangers, isn’t everyone except your mother a stranger until you meet them?
• Being satisfied would bring an abrupt halt to invention.
• It’s not safe to get on the freeway either, but we must do it to get where we’re going

When your heart and mind are longing to go in a new direction, disregard sensible advice. It’s not doing what you love that you will later regret.

There are many three-word phrases that delight people. Three of my favorites are No Assembly Required.

Whether I’m shopping for furniture, home decor or appliances, I am thrilled to see those three words. They mean that I can take my purchase home and begin using it right away.

My love of these three words extends to people too. I just love people who are so well adjusted that there is No Assembly Required. They are ready to go as is.

I’m referring to people who are fun to be with, easy going, comfortable in their own skin, guided by integrity, have a great sense of humor, are comfortable with all types of people and always leave you feeling better than when they arrived.

Let’s face it. There are some people who clearly seem to need some assembly. What’s worse, some of the necessary parts are missing.

When I’m with a No Assembly Required (NAR) I don’t have to worry about tripping over her unresolved baggage, or tiptoeing around his tender ego. We have fun laughing or just being quiet together.

NARs are great. May you always attract them. May you be one.

When the founding fathers announced in the Declaration of Independence that we have the right to the pursuit of happiness, they didn’t really mean ALL of us. But times have changed and now we all are encouraged to pursue happiness, and in some unlikely places.

Coke has bottled it if you can believe their campaigns promising happiness in a bottle. They have spent huge sums on commercials, billboards and celebrities to convince us that sharing a Coke is the same as saying hello.

Harvard University is teaching it in their most popular course on campus, Psychology 1504, “Positive Psychology.” Twice a week about 900 students flock to Tal Ben-Shahar’s class to gain insight into the secret to happiness. He bases his course on research from the new field of positive psychology which focuses on what makes people happy.
Take a look at Ben-Shahar’s tips to achieve happiness.

You know, of course, that you don’t have to drink a Coke or take a class to be happy. In the photo above I’m savoring a break from work to have lunch with my friend Melissa. Having lunch with friends always makes me happy.

So what are you waiting for? Pursue happiness.