Challenge Accepted #100HappyDays

Yet again it feels like we haven’t posted any real content in a while! For that I apologise, sometimes in life the journey looks like defeating obstacles and overcoming challenges, the real gritty stuff of life that’s inspiring, motivational, the real article-worthy times of life. And other times, days are filled with hours spent in bed, work sessions at the desk revising and times spent in baggy t-shirts and joggers hibernating some what from everyday life. And that is what the last month or so has looked like for most of our team bearing in mind Mock examinations (bar Hannah who is helping orphans, building clinics and doing article…nay book worthy things every day!). With exams looming over our heads, emphasis is put on staying in and working rather than focusing on tackling big challenges or forming intricate plans which is what we hope to spend countless day doing once these exams are over!

 However this is an article I have been meaning to write for a while now! 13 days to be precise (#Day13…read on to understand that)

 I have written endlessly on the importance of being happy with your lot in life no matter how mundane the moment. And now a group of us are taking this into our own hands.

 Because we can all sit there and make promises to commit to looking for the small things in life, make big elaborate gestures to be happy even in the trials of everyday life……however these are more often than not empty promises, to put it in seasonal context it can become like countless failed lent attempts where by day 3 you’ve forgotten what you even gave up, all resolve dissolved by the stresses and distractions of life.

And so how are we doing this I hear you ask? Well in the form of a popular viral trend that you may have seen. The #100happydays challenge.

One of my favorite TV shows is How I met your Mother and for those of you that follow the show you know that one of the infamous catch phrases of the character Barney’s  is to declare ‘challenge accepted’, when someone says something a bit outrageous, or slightly improbable. This is the attitude I wanted to take on, to say challenge accepted to the notion of being happy for 100 days, which admittedly sounds a little far fetched…a tad improbable.

Now the challenge is not naïve, it realises that everyday is not filled with amazing things, but the aim of the game so to speak is to find something happy in each day, might be something small. One of mine was my new fairy lights and flowers making my bedroom a nicer place to revise in, whereas another day was getting a good mock grade, some days its something small others more monumental.

 All summed up nicely in a quote…. “Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect…it means that you’ve decided to look past the imperfections”. That’s the realistic element of the challenge, that says you can have bad days but it encourages you to find something happy in that day.

This is related to Andy’s Beat because a group of us are contributing to a facebook group where we post our photos and comments, and for each day we cannot find something or forget to post we owe a 50p fine. It keeps the homepage clear of a daily photo update and has created a great little community of people sharing the good in their lives!

And many of us have found it makes each day happier already, because we are consciously searching for good things, we know in the back of our minds we need to post something so sub-consciously it pushes us to do something nice or to open our eyes up to the already happy things happening in our everyday lives.

So I’m not asking you to pay a fine to us, or telling you how you should do this. You may not want to stick to the format of the #100 happy days but I encourage you to try.

 Will you accept the challenge?