I’m writing this very late in the day compared to usual and I also still have a lot of my usual daily tasks to do, including extra hours of work today as some new projects have come in and, because I’ve not had a full workload lately, I feel like I should make up for the missed days by working extra hours now that I do have work. But I let myself sleep in this morning and I also went for a run today and so I’m really very behind where I would usually be.
At the moment, I feel pretty relaxed about that. One of the benefits of spring/summer is that the days are longer so there isn’t so much of a sense of having to get things done before the light goes. It’s just absolutely beautiful today actually. Blue sky, it’s not exactly warm but it feels pretty warm compared to the cold weather we had only last week. There are quite a lot of flowers and some greenery in my garden, blossom on the pear tree I can see from my window. Everything just feels lovely actually.
I also don’t have any demands on my time today other than getting my work done and my writing. I’d like to sow some seeds today but I got all the compost and egg boxes prepared yesterday so it’s only the fun bit of actually doing the sowing that’s left. So I’m looking forward to that. I made a start on cleaning my house yesterday so that now feels like a less daunting task.
Altogether, I’m in an incredibly good mood and I was as soon as I woke up today. I think the main reason is that my running has gone very well for the last week and I now feel, if not exactly confident, then at least well, actually no, I do feel kind of confident about my upcoming ultramarathon event. It’s not a race and it’s not really an ultramarathon exactly, more of a charity walk that you can run if you really want to! I’m not sure if that confidence is misplaced as I’ve only done one long run so far, but it’s really just that my body seems to be holding up ok to the added miles I’ve done over the last couple of weeks and that seems like a very good sign.
I think I also did some important mindset work at the start of this week, after feeling pretty awful on Sunday night and through to Monday and maybe even yesterday morning? I really had to work through some unhappy thoughts and just doing that, I think, has cleared the way for happiness.
Which brings me on to today’s ACIM lesson. Today’s lesson, 51, is a review of the first 5 lessons of the course, and it’s all about how we don’t really see anything and everything we think we are seeing is just a product of our thinking, which is wrong, and therefore meaningless. And that’s really great when we’re thinking negative thoughts about how awful life is. It’s very comforting to be told that it’s all incorrect. We’re just thinking wrongly. But it’s a bit different when you’re feeling happy! To be told that the birds tweeting and the pretty flowers, and how well we’re running, and things we’re looking forward to, and maybe relationships that are going well, is all meaningless, incorrect, and not real, is a bit sobering actually.
And I’m not quite sure how to interpret it except I think that I did kind of touch on this in yesterday’s blog. I’m happy today because I think that everything’s going well and I feel positive about the future. I’m happy and relaxed and I don’t feel under pressure or rushed. But what happens tomorrow or the next day or even in the next hour, when something less positive happens? If my happiness is based on the idea that I need everything to be going my way, then it’s really fragile and unsustainable. And maybe my happiness isn’t based on that. Maybe I’m just choosing happiness.
I have to say I’m a bit confused but I think the way the Course works is that it starts by taking away all the things you think are true, and then it adds back in the actual truth, so maybe we haven’t got to the adding back in of happy thoughts yet and I’m just getting ahead of myself? Time will tell. I didn’t intend this blog to be a record of my study of A Course in Miracles, but because I tend to read the lesson each morning before I write the blog post, it tends to be what’s on my mind as I’m writing.
In other news, I’m still managing to delay my first coffee of the morning until breakfast, and it’s still feeling very odd and I don’t really feel awake until I’ve had it, but it doesn’t feel as hard as it did for the first few days. My no Tv challenge has completely gone out the window and I’m happily watching a couple of hours of TV each night, plus iPad games, plus quite a bit of YouTube (running videos) throughout the day. It’s making me happy at the moment, but I’ll have to see whether it just becomes too much again and I have to take drastic action.
This makes three days of blogging in a row which I’m really happy about. So I’ll hopefully back tomorrow for day 4 of this week.