Collision with happiness

Every morning I wake up and ask myself if I’m happy. This is a terrible habit for my mental health but over the last few weeks, the answer is that I’m actually happy. This is a strange and out of body experience because this hasn’t been the case for the majority of my life. As little as six months ago, I was feeling unhappy every morning, bordering on restlessness and flirting with sadness. What turned things around and is this happiness sustainable?

Six months ago, I was on paternity leave and had made big plans to pursue long term professional goals that I never had a chance to pursue because of my full time day job. I thought the extra time I had on paternity leave would allow me to pour myself into those goals but week after week, I was literally doing nothing to move the needle on that front. Instead, I was finding happiness in spending time with my daughter, wife and parents. As well as the joy of doing nothing. But I was trying to fight this feeling, rather than embrace it.

All my life, being a type A personality, happiness was married to my professional life. The paternity leave was a strange window into realising it’s possible to be unhappy professionally but happy personally. Perhaps this sounds obvious to most people but it was a profound realisation for me. I’m also the kind of person who likes to reinvent his life every few years and by that I mean change everything. Originally, I had planned to use the paternity leave as an opportunity to reinvent myself. But the burden of this reinvention was weighing me down because of the lack of progress rather than exciting me.

So I started experimenting with doing something different half way through my paternity leave. Instead of changing everything at once, I started changing one thing a week and tried to chew on small pieces of it daily. For background, I wanted to start two side gigs, play tennis thrice a week, get closer to religion, make a new YouTube video every day, re-evaluate my purpose in life and take care of my new born baby during the paternity leave. The expectations were crushing me instead of inspiring me. So I started doing something radically simple. For one week, I told myself the only way I’d evaluate whether my day is a success is if I woke up in the morning and did a gratitude exercise, where I’d write down three things I’m grateful for in my diary. That’s it. That’s the only thing I’d evaluate myself on. Everything else could wait, I was on leave after all.

The gratitude exercise had a transformational impact not just on my week — because I focused on what I was grateful for rather than what I didn’t have or was behind on — but it also had a snowball effect that would rip through the existing pillars of my life. The following week the gratitude exercise became easier to do because it was turning into a habit so I decided to take on one more task. Setting up a tennis date for next week. One date instead of three. The next week I played tennis. The following week I increased the frequency to twice a week. I felt so energised and excited at the end of my games and the morning after.

Week by week, I added a new habit or goal I wanted to achieve and because I was setting expectations so ridiculously low, I was actually able to achieve change and feel happy about my progress rather than denigrating myself for not making progress. Fast forward six months and my life stands transformed. I’m now playing tennis regularly, having dinner with a friend every week, reading the newspaper, doing gratitude exercises and getting closer to God. I didn’t start two side gigs but changed my day job to being something more mission driven, which is helping me re-discover my purpose. Every evening after work, I take my daughter for a walk in the park and it’s the best part of my day. I guess what they say is true: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 3^rd, 2021.

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