Structure Your Freedom!

Why is it so hard to be happy? Why is it so much work? I usually plan on writing first thing in the morning when I get up. Many days, like today, I just don't want to do it. As if it is a bad thing, when in fact it always makes me happy. Sometimes it's hard to do the things you love, the things that will make you happy.It is a lot less work to be miserable. All I have to do to be unhappy is stop doing the things I love. On a Sunday like this, just sitting around doing nothing does not make me happy. But again, there is so much emphasis on what we are doing all the time. There is an art to doing nothing.Sometimes stopping everything that you are doing can make you happy. It's kind of like it's a lot of work to stop doing things that make you unhappy. Some people cannot sit still. But there is so much beauty in stillness. They say silence can make you very creative. Literally just being yourself can open new channels in your being.It's funny because I don't want to be doing this thing that I am doing right now. But I know the value of it. Writing is not just me expressing myself. It lets me be me. It allows me to be myself and see myself and share myself. Sometimes the biggest challenge is being yourself.I want to be free more than anything. I used to think if I made myself do things I didn't want to do, I would lose my freedom. But in fact, making myself do things I need to do to be happy gives me the freedom to be happy. In fact, that is the kind of freedom I want. Yes, I am forcing myself to do things, however, I am the one forcing myself, no one else is forcing me. This is still freedom. I am still free. It is my choice to be happy.Discipline has been the hardest thing for me to get a handle on in my life. But discipline has freed me from feeling like a failure and actually failing at doing the things I want to do to be content. Contentment is what we are all after, isn't it? I feel like life is a habit, what we do over and over again creates our life. It sounds boring and repetitive at first, to do the same thing over and over again, but in actuality, it is freeing you up to be the person you want to be.I have actual rituals now, mostly in the mornings. Things that I like to do in a particular order in order to get to my goals. I go to my success planner when I first wake up. This is a new planner I got from the author Brendon Burchard, I highly recommend it to everyone. It puts your real goals in focus. The next thing I like to do is write in my food journal, this is helping me lose weight. I simply journal how I am feeling about my eating patterns. Then I write for this blog. I meditate after that and then read first non-fiction than fiction. I need to walk after that, I have recently added that to my regiment.Honestly, even though I am making myself do something over and over again, I have never felt so free. It's like I know what I have to do in life, I don't have to think about it. There is a great freedom in that. Right now I have the time to do all of this in the mornings because I work in the afternoon to evening. I am trying to take advantage of this particular schedule.I used to be adamantly against structure, I thought it was oppressive. But the fact is, it allows you to feel in control and do the things that you would want to do, with all the freedom in the world. You are free to change your structure or ignore it. But I feel better when I follow it.By religion, I am a Sikh. The word 'Sikh' means disciple. One who has a discipline. In our religion, the discipline we are mostly supposed to follow is meditating on god's name over and over and over again. Doing the same thing over and over again. I used to think this was boring and repetitive and pointless. But when I started meditating on god's name, every day, I noticed that every time I did it, I felt a joy creep up inside of me, as if my insides, my soul, was smiling.Maybe the prophets were right. They believed in discipline and ritual, but not empty ritual. Don't do something over and over again if it doesn't mean anything to you. Do it only if it creates meaning in your life. My repetition of doing things has created a beautiful meaning in my life.I am more alive now than I was when I didn't know what to do with my time. When I had no structure. I am not a planner or a structurer by nature, I had to learn to be this way. I am random and inconsistent by nature, but I found that that practice was not suiting me.Being happy again is work, it takes planning and structure and discipline. It is not just a feeling. It is a decision, something you have to sustain with good habits. What you do over and over again creates who you are and what your life is. In the introduction to Brenden Burchard's book 'High Performance Habits' there is this quote:"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is then not an act, but a habit."--Aristotle.nina