The Happiness Dilemma

Last Sunday, I plopped onto the couch, curled up into the lap of a man I love, and did absolutely nothing but watch documentaries from morning to night while eating ice cream, laughing hysterically, and pausing for extremely necessary sex breaks. It was glorious. I felt happy and dizzy and blissed out. My joy bubbled up from brain stem to crown and left me smiling and slightly lobotomized in its wake. But somewhere, in the pit of my stomach, a familiar twinge of worry began to blossom. A faint notion of guilt for spending a day doing nothing other than resting and being happy crept across my toes and made me shiver.

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What Is at the Root of Your Discomfort?

The thing that I fear most isn’t taking a whipper on a towering rock face or an unexpected mountain lion attack; it’s complacency. You’ve seen the pattern – we all have – somewhere around the age of 27-35, we pair off, move into a domicile of some type, have children, and somewhere along the way, we stop trying. We cruise through comfortable jobs that don’t challenge us, we stop working out, and, what hurts my heart the most, is that most of us stop putting effort into the most important romantic relationship of our lives. It’s a sobering reality when you think about how finite the blip of time we get on this cloud-strewn marble is.

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