Inspiration and insight come, sometimes, from the strangest places.

Yesterday I was reading an article on trends in the creation of new scents in perfume. The article ended with instructions on how to wear perfume. (New instructions that I had not read before: put perfume on upper arms because that’s the part of your body you move the most, on neck so that people smell the scent when they hug you, and a big quirt down your back so that perfume lingers!)

The author instructed that spraying perfume in the room and then “stepping out into it” is definitely not the way to put perfume on. I smiled about this because it would never have crossed my mind to spray something as expensive as perfume into the room and then to try to “step into it” as a way of wearing the scent.

I suppose the discussion about “stepping out into a spray of perfume” was still resonating somewhere in my consciousness this morning when I got up. I looked outside into the spring-green tree tops around the back side of our house, saw the sunlight dappled in lovely patterns on the wood planks of the deck, and heard the birds sounding out into the breeze.

My next thought?

“I’m going to take every opportunity I have this morning to step out into the day.” Then I wondered, “What do we mean when we say step out into the day?” Is the day an envelope of beauty to step into? A bubble of light and pattern? A contained space of some sort that is filled with temperature and color and sound? (more…)

Elizabeth Tashjian, age 94, just died.

Elizabeth was an expert.

She was an expert on nuts.

The headline of her obituary in The Sunday New York Times read:Elizabeth Tashjian, 94, An Expert on Nuts, Dies.

I laughed out loud when I read that headline, laughed with happiness for this woman whom I had never heard of who had focused her life on something she was absolutely crazy about studying: nuts. (more…)

When I did the research for my book, Tough Transitions, I enjoyed learning about all the investigations that are going on to try to determine how people can increase their experience of happiness.

There’s a lot of information to read on this subject, and all of it is fascinating.

One thing that some researchers have suggested is that each of us has an individual “happiness thermostat” and that each person’s thermostat is stuck at that person’s basic setting. What this means is that when both good or bad things happen in an individual’s life, the individual will eventually adapt to both kinds of events and return to the same basic happiness thermostat setting that the person is accustomed to.

But some studies disagree with this assertion. These studies suggest that we can get our personal happiness thermostat unstuck by thinking particular ways and doing specific things. We can increase our experience of happiness by the thoughts we focus on and the actions we take. (more…)