Happiness 02/03/12

Are you happy in life? How happy are you? On a scale of 1 to 100 with 1 being completely unhappy and 100 perfectly happy, where would you land? These are questions that I often ask myself. I am a pretty analytical person; I believe that I have the ability to take a step back from the mess and confusion that is everyday life and look at events and circumstances with a more objective opinion that my involvement usually allows. However, these are rarely questions that get fully discussed in the open. We all like to think we're happy. We all like to think the people surrounding us are happy. I suppose it allows us to accept our first world guilt when the media bombards us, once or twice a year when its Comic/Sports Relief time, with images of poverty in India or Africa. It also allows us to accept any decisions we make as the right ones and, as narcissitic creatures, we like to think we always make and always have made the right decision.
There usually comes a point, though, when we look at our lives and are not completely satisfied. We decide to change things. This usually happens on January 1st of each year when countless resolutions are made and then forgotten a week later. How many times have you decided to change your diet to lose weight? Do more chores to help out your parents? Watch less TV and read more books? Learn a second language? I've done all of these and, to be honest, I do them all regularly in cycles. I have never followed one of these through. Sure, for two weeks I might pick up a book instead of switching on my laptop but that soon ends when I discover a new internet obsession. When faced with such a drastic change in circumstances, one is forced to change, to reevaluate. For the next three months I won't have the unlimited bandwidth and broadband speeds I have at home. The people around me will all speak Swahili, not perfect English. This is an opportunity for me to improve, to experience new culture and situations not available to me living in England.
So, what are my goals?

1. Learn Swahili. There are multiple reasons for this, first and foremost because it will make life in Tanzania so much easier. Secondary reasons include becoming bilingual and speaking a language that much of my family speak (Yes, I will learn Cantonese at some point too. Sit down).

2. Read more. I'm an English Literature graduate for crying out loud. I should be reading often anyway. But I don't. I brought with me a collection of Hemingway's, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, a Fitzgerald collection of short stories including 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', and Friedrich Nietzsche's Why I Am So Wise.

3. Get fitter. I hope that the lack of TV will give me more time to do some exercise. I really need to get into shape.

4. Learn to cook a new cuisine. My cooking repetoire is fairly limited and needs expanding. My list of impressive (personal opinion) limited to about two. Being able to cook some unusual Tanzanian dishes would be a quirky alternative for dinner parties.

5. Appreaciate what I have at home and not take things for granted. We are spoiled in the West. I have never really appreciated the fact that I have been able to have an education of the quality that I have. This needs to change before law school.

6. Gain a unique experience. In today's job market you need something to make you stand out and I hope this will help me on my way to standing out.
So, there it is. We shall see in June how far I got.