A new collage idea I tried: making a picture with tissue paper

We all know those moments when we suddenly and with no explanation feel happy. Perhaps we’re doing something mundane like wiping the counter top while we look out the window…then this sense of contentment or joy just comes over us like the morning dew. Perhaps we’re reaching for a board in a workshop or putting up a piece of sewing…there’s a moment of satisfaction and peace, a feeling we could call happiness. We might be putting a baby to bed or feeding a kitten, and we find ourselves feeling full and happy. Someone asked me about these unsummoned moments of happiness the other day. I answered that the only way I could account for them was that they were gifts of grace.

A new place I visited: Lake Louise in Canada

Then my friend and I talked about another kind of happiness… happiness we can actually create for ourselves through our own actions. Dr. Gregory Berns, an M.D. at Emory University in Atlanta, has done research that suggests that novelty is one key to a satisfying life. If we want to cultivate happiness, we can seek new things to do that stimulate and engage us. This doesn’t mean crazy things that require one to risk life and limb, just things that are new. Things that you’ve never done before. Not only does doing new things keep the pleasure areas of the brain stimulated, Dr. Burns says, but the action also helps build emotional resilience. This is because some novelties turn out to be great and some turn out to be something you wouldn’t be interested in repeating.

These new things we can do deliberately fall into categories like:

Physical: try a sport or physical activity you’ve never done before;
Intellectual: like attending a lecture on a subject you’ve never thought about before or reading a book or watching a movie that you would not have thought of reading or viewing in the past;
Social: making a connection with someone new; and
Spiritual: doing something that takes you into the transcendent, such as spiritual experiences, art, music.

I’m making my first snow angel ever

In the past couple of weeks I’ve paid attention when I did something completely new. I went to a political grassroots gathering for the first time in my entire life. I picked up Wired magazine and read things about technology that I ordinarily would not have shown the least interest in. I stepped on an elliptical trainer at the gym, a machine I had avoided in the past. I wrote a psalm for my quiet time that included words of lament about the old age of our dog Dusty. None of these things held a candle, of course, to those moments of happiness that come from grace. But doing these new things did energize me, interest me, and give me a lot of feelings of joy and pleasure. Doing new things is not a quick fix that promises eternal happiness, but I found that they are avenues to satisfaction. Satisfaction can be a very fine thing to experience in the in-betweens of those times of real, grace-given happiness.

Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld offers wisdom and practical insights to anyone whose life is in a time of transition, change, grief and loss of any kind. As an internationally recognized and accomplished consultant, and author of more than twenty books - including Tough Transitions and Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - she is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.