Such is life, I have started to think. You often don't feel the way you think you are going to feel about something when it actually happens. I read an article in The New Yorker magazine called "Everybody Have Fun" by Elizabeth Kolbert. I can't stop thinking about it. It explains some happiness research that has been done in the past 50 or so years. how people tend to mispredict how much happiness or displeasure future events will bring. like winning the lottery for instance. how we put so much hope into things like higher incomes, bigger homes, more things, even having more children and how in reality we end up feeling disappointment - or a lack of increased satisfaction at the least. Author Derek Bok says "People do not always know what will give them lasting satisfaction."
The article's point gets more political (how policymakers can learn from these happiness findings), but just those ideas above alone are the most interesting to me. What I get from it is this: live in the present. Some day we will move back to Chicago, and I will have a whole new slew of things to complain about. the piercing cold winters, long commutes with terrible traffic... Maybe my dream of moving back will not make all the pieces of life suddenly fall into place.
But can't a gal dream? Without my dreams of summer thunder storms, chilly fall nights, Sunday dinners with family, walks to coffee and parks with friends, I would feel very sad. I don't want to let go of that dream because without it nowhere is just right for us.
Love this post, Katello...and I'm going to have to look up the article you reference because it (and you)speaks so much to things that I've been thinking a lot about recently. As I type this I'm sitting in our rented condo in St. Thomas watching my amazing beautiful boy drive a little truck around the tile floor....he's just discovered a new use for the little car other than banging it on things or putting it in his mouth...talk about living in the moment!
ReplyDeleteLove you so much, my friend!