Want to be happy – keep things simple!

It’s Sunday and I have been reading the papers. I read an article by Suzy Greaves entitled “How to make peace with yourself” in which she advocates learning to live with odd socks. For all of us who have promised to become “more organised” to improve our quality of life this really struck a chord.

Like Suzy I have learned that there are things in my life that simply don’t matter that much to me. As an extreme I took the curtains in my living room down in early July and decided that I would only rehang them when I had replaced the curtain rail. Have I done it yet? No. Does it bother me? No. When the darker nights start to creep in and I have to go back to switching lights on it will become more important.

I know people who say they are only happy if things are in a certain way – done in a specific order. That works for them – and that’s fine.

But I remember a salesman doing one of those home demonstration things for a superdooper vacuum cleaner – you know the kind where a “friend” gives them your name to get them out of their house. He showed me a million things it could do – right down to cleaning my jewellery –  and asked me how I could possibly live without it.

Well the simple answer was that that ( extreme by my standards) level of cleanliness was not important to me. I was not brave enough to say that to him though.

Why not try getting rid of the guilt that you have created for yourself by committing to do something that really – in the scheme of things – does not make a scrap of difference to the quality of your life and see what happens. You can always re-introduce a mini version if you need to.