All the Small Things

As a young girl I never wore makeup, I didn’t shave my legs, and it didn’t matter if I made any money or not selling play dough figurines at the front gate. My heart was full and warm when I spent an afternoon drinking tea and reading an entire book front to back, baking a cake for my family, spending hours kicking a soccer ball around every weekend (even though I wasn’t very good at it), having a warm bubble bath and day dreaming for an hour, listening and dancing my heart out to questionable 90’s music, writing stories that no one would ever read, and eating as many cookies as I wanted - thank you very much!

I do not know if it the curse of getting older, or just an unfortunate mindset of the modern world, but do you ever find yourself just going through the motions each day? I know I am guilty of having the mindset that “next year I am going to go on holiday / I’ll find a better job soon and then things will be good”. I find myself neglecting to do the things that make me happy. It is so easy to get home from work and just want to make anything simple, watch some TV then go to bed. I feel like I am letting myself be alive but only really living two days a week. Some weeks it feels more like 0 - it’s easy to spend those days sleeping because I am tired or cleaning because I have been too lazy to during the week.

I want to hold on to all those things that I made a priority as a child. Do you ever feel yourself being too lazy to do anything that actually makes you happy?? I call for making the small things a priority. I know that everything that I enjoyed as a child I still enjoy now. I like to call them my Creature Comforts.

I’m not just talking about the material things or luxuries that help to provide for one’s bodily comfort.  For me, creature comforts are the things that make us each individually happy. For one person this could be spending time making a nourishing meal or walking their dog in the local park. For another, reading their favourite book for the tenth time, writing their own story, or taking a long bath.

Most definitions of creature comforts are things that are not necessities as they are not things needed to “live”. I want to argue that they are. We must value the time we have and spend it doing the things that fulfill us, not merely sustain us. What is the point in life if you are not really living?

I aim to make my creature comforts a priority from now on. I hope to share some of them with you and hopefully either give you some ideas or just put a little bit of extra colour in your life! Please feel free to share your creature comforts with me. What makes you happy?