TODAY’S HAPPINESS HOW-TO: Mold Your Life Like Clay

Paint your doors and plant your trees. Your world is how you decide to mold it. (Image by Amy Spencer; French Quarter, New Orleans, 2011)

“This is your world. Shape it or someone else will.”

I know one thing about clay: If you don’t pick it up and mold it into something, it sits like a lump on the table until someone picks it up or throws it away. Well, our lives are a lot like that clay. If we don’t pick it up and proactively shape what we want for ourselves, who knows what it will become?

Sometimes, I know, it feels like life is happening to us and that we’re mere pawns in the game: The boss gives us an assignment we hate having to do. Some drama goes down with a good friend. Our rent goes up. Our back goes out. A date doesn’t write us back online like we hoped they would.“Why is this happening to me?” we ask our life. “Why are you making it so hard?”

Yes, things happen to us. But we also have an extremely powerful tool to bring to the art table of life: We have the ability to shape our lives by the choices we make and the attitude we present. How?

Try this: Mold each day this week like a piece of clay. Approach that dreaded job assignment with the goal of learning something new. Tell your friend how you feel from the bottom of your heart. Turn your hobby into an inventive way to make cash to cover the rent increase. Use the time you’re laid out in bed with back problems catching up on the good books you keep meaning to read. And if your date isn’t writing you back online, delete them from your love plan and start looking again for someone who willlove you back in a big, big way. Make your life what you want it to be or life will do it for you.

Start today: Shape your own clay. Be the kind, positive, even-keeled, productive, loving person you know you can be, and mold your life, hour by hour and day by day into the one you dream of having. Because if you don’t shape your world the way you want it, someone else will.

What do you want to mold going forward today? What area of your life do you want to take control of once and for all?

Big love,