SERENITY - the state or quality of being serene, calm, or tranquil; composure, peacefulness, peace. [Serenity week begins here. Click for this week's Bliss Initiatives.]
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Wow, this week has flown by! I am typing this post with a bit of a headache. Yep, it is official, I had too much to drink last night. Those pomegranate martinis my sweetie made for our dinner party were just too delicious! I am such a total lightweight these days. Half a glass of wine and I'm ready for bed so having a perpetually full glass last night was really over the top! Fun it was however. This was our first party in the new house and I have to say it was great. Jessie and I have been going to the park and having playdates with same group of mommies and kids since she was 6 months old. We just started adding a monthly pot luck to include the daddies too and it has been really fun. A rather raucous end to serenity week!
Actually serenity is more of an internal thing and all in all I have to give myself a much better score then last time out. For you new readers of my blog, once a week I evaluate myself on the virtue of the week. Ben Franklin conducted his experiment very differently and measured his progress daily. I, instead, check in at the end of my week and give myself a rather arbitrary score on the week based on a 10 point scale. It is a kind of gut check and now that I am into the second go around on my virtues (I will cover each of my virtues 4 times in a year) I also compare my result to the last time around. Recently I've also added Bliss Boosts to measure any increase of Everyday Bliss, more about that in a minute.
Last time out I gave myself a 2 out of 10. All in all this week was much more successful and I will give myself a 5. The brilliance of starting where you are was the biggest factor in my increase. I caught myself saying it like a little mantra this week. "Start where you are Kath" gave me a lot of power and miraculously made me feel pretty good about where I was! Previously I was really picking lofty Bliss Initiatives that were designed for some type of ideal I had no hope of attaining. This serenity week was much more serene! I still didn't do everything I set out to do but I'm not beating myself up because of it. I think I will be considering start where you are as I design all of my Bliss Initiatives in the future.
I'm also going to give myself three bliss boosts. I just started measuring the actual increase in Everyday Bliss. Unlike my 10 point scale which considers how I performed on the particular virtue, I've decided to measure if I've had any increase in bliss. This is not a 10 point scale. I just look back at the week and ask myself, "Did I experience more bliss in my life?" and all in all, for this week that answer is a yes!
I'll close the week with an image that I hope causes you to pause and breath deeply for a minute.
(It is a picture of a Lake Serenity I found in Google Images, how fitting!)
Next Post: Inquiry week begins!
My 13 bliss virtues: joy, order, creativity, passion, whimsy, serenity, inquiry, community, romance, gratitude, moxie, humility, surprise
My 13 bliss virtues: joy, order, creativity, passion, whimsy, serenity, inquiry, community, romance, gratitude, moxie, humility, surprise
