All posts tagged: Happiness

Post #35: The Intimation of Life

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Welcome to the thirty-fifth post of the Great Writing Challenge of 2012. Five days a week for six months, I will be given a topic to write about. The stipulation: it must be 250 words (or more), and positive in tone. If you would like to suggest topics for me to write about, please email me at TheRebeccaProject [at] gmail [dot] com. This morning, we enjoyed slowly waking up and adjusting to the day. We made a breakfast of oatmeal and bagels, with a cuppa tea for me and coffee for the American, and switched on Fox Soccer. It was Bolton v Tottenham game from White Heart Lane. Little did we know what would happen next, live on television. The 23-year-old Bolton midfielder, Fabrice Muamba, had a heart attack. Right there on the pitch. The looks on the faces of the players from both sides said a thousand words. Muamba had apparently stopped breathing and they were resuscitating him on the field. It was horrendous. Part of hearing terrible news is the about-face you encounter …

I want to believe.

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I’ve been reading a lot lately (lots of Alain de Botton and Her Holiness Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi) and thinking more comprehensively, discerning more comprehensively, yet I don’t feel any closer in finding what it is I seek. “We can conclude …that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.” — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness I’m at an interesting point of my life. I desire simplicity, freedom, adventure, beauty, awareness, zest for life and an open heart. These are all qualities I feel I am lacking, and as de Botton says, these are things I am drawn to other aspects of my life such as art, artefacts and architecture. The reality is that I just don’t believe… in anything. I used …

It was four years ago today…

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…When I, by chance, met the love of my life on a couch in a hostel in the west of Ireland. It was November 2006. The month before, I had left my comfortable, old life as a Sports Copytaker at AAP in Sydney, Australia, and moved to Ireland. I’d overcome my existential crisis (“How do I fit my life in a suitcase?”), said my tearful goodbyes to friends and family, and flew halfway around the world. I spent three and a half weeks travelling around, drinking in Galway with other Aussies who were also there for the International Rules, hiking in Killarney, partying in Cork, madness in Dublin, and meeting new friends (Hello Gill! Hello Alice!) whom I knew were more than just passing acquaintances. And then I made one of the best decisions of my life: to return to Galway and base myself there. I returned to Sleepzone — the same place where I’d stayed with the other Fanatics for the first game of International Rules. I met the local cast of (mostly Aussie) …