I’ve been thinking and thinking ….. how do I start a conversation nationally about real happiness?
I was talking about this to one of my angels, Nicole, when she came up with a brilliant suggestion. Why don’t we have a Happiness Lime?
It is difficult to explain to non-Caribbean people exactly what a lime is because it is so intrinsically Trinidadian. Hopefully, it will be enough to say that people come expecting to have a good time and there is usually food, drink and laughter involved. In fact, Trinidadians associate a lime with happiness (with a small “h”).
I have been feeling a vague but persistent resistance to doing anything that would really get this going so I balked at the thought of trying to arrange such a thing. Not to be deterred, Nicole said: ‘Let’s just have a small group – maybe five or six!’
Now, one of the Life Lessons that I have learned is that when you are facing seemingly large challenges you break them down into tiny steps and focus on just that tiny step and then the next tiny step until ….. before you know it you have overcome the challenge!
The original idea was to have the lime outdoors, preferably by the sea. But this is the middle of the rainy season and it is difficult to predict exactly when it will rain.
That did not stop the indomitable Nicole. She simply said: ‘Well, we’ll have this one indoors – at my office.’ And in this way she gave me a hand with every perceived difficulty that I came up with.
So another Life Lesson is the critical importance of having good support.
Eventually, there were ten of us.
We had a wonderful time. We had wine and tea and snacks and some great conversation and laughs. We had some really interesting insights about what real happiness is and some of the actions that we could do to help that along. We found out that even though we didn’t all know each other when we met, we had so much in common.
It ended with everybody wanting to know when was the next lime!
If you would like to be part of the conversation – either in person or virtually – just let me know! Leave a comment! Let us focus on what brings real happiness instead of talking about all the things that are wrong with the world.