Daily Gratitude: We can’t just sit around waiting and hoping something will come along to make us happy. It just doesn’t work that way. If we’re not feeling happy, we need to take some sort of action. Sometimes it’s any type of action – doesn’t have to be planned or orchestrated. Often just going for a walk will do it – get those energetic juices going. Once that is started, you might just feel like doing something else. This weekend I didn’t want to go out for my training walk. I was feeling tired and listless. I’d had a migraine headache on Thursday and Friday so Saturday morning, the lethargy was still there. But I knew that if I waited around for the “urge” and “desire” to come, I might be waiting a long time. I had the impetus of knowing that I only have 3 months to train for Vol State and each day I sat around “hoping I’d be trained enough” was another wasted day. So I had to make myself go out. After if gone about a mile i forgot how I had felt and began to enjoy it. That happens a lot so I had that experience in my armory to draw upon. This, i technically knew it would happen. But it still required discipline to get me going. Then when I came home, I just wanted to rest and relax. But again, I knew that I only had another day and a half to put out items for “bulky trash removal”. So, if I didn’t want to wait another 6 months to declutter some more, I had to get my butt moving. That was hard too but I made myself get up and work. For each of these I had incentives and you’re wondering what to do if you don’t have such incentives. Make the incentive simply be “getting off your butt” or “getting started”. Think of it as priming the pump. If you want to be more active or more creative, prime the pump by taking some action – any action – and then see what happens. Try an experiment and just find a way to get up and do some simple little thing and then see what the rest of the day brings.