Going with....

...the flow.

The move is coming along.  Computers are going on line (still no charting system available, maybe tomorrow), old building is almost empty (5 of my boxes are missing in action, but they will turn up), lots of shopping trips to Target (retail therapy on the clock), building issues (like who signed off on data ports with no associated power outlets?).  Some tempers are short, everyone is tired.  Except me.

I'm strangely invigorated by the adventure.  Just going with the flow.  Having my computer on line was the first blessing, I somehow didn't feel cut off from civilization.  I make lists of stuff to bring and to buy, and I've been able to leave early yesterday and today.

Even the delivery of my boxes from the old building made me supremely happy today.  OK, I'm weird.

On my iPod right now is The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  I think this has a lot to do with my upbeat frame of mine.  Gretchen, an author and former attorney, spent a year studying and implementing a plan to increase her own happiness.  Her list of Personal Commandments (on the right side of the website) immediately resonated with me.  And her Secrets of Adulthood made me laugh and cry in the same 3 minutes.   (Gretchen:  I would add one to the Secret List:  You must be present to win!)

Her insights are sound, her advice is spot on, and listening to her while I work has been a point of happiness in and of itself.  I find myself nodding in agreement as she chronicles her insights from month to month.

This week's resolution on her website is to "make something by hand."  As a quilter, I made stuff by hand all the time, and I reflected on how much joy (sometimes... no, often... peppered with frustration) that this avocation brings me.  I made a mala for my yoga teacher before he left for Peru.  For 2 hours, I sat beading and knotting and adding a prayer with each bead.  Not only was I intensely happy making it, but he was so happy to receive it.  It was a meditation of pure joy. 

Rudyard Kipling's poem If just popped into my mind.   OK, so its a little sexist (how bout adding a daughter to that last line?), but it surely resonates with my sense of going with the flow.  Especially the iconic first stanzas:

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

And I would add (paraphrasing the sage advice of my river friends):

Keep your head above water

and

your feet down stream...

and you'll get to the shore.