In the Last Hour

Let me tell you what I have done in the past 60 minutes before I started writing this.

- I told myself that I *have* to update my blog, because after my recent reading of The Rules of Wealth, I realised how important it is to cultivate a skill that you enjoy and which no one can take it away from you. Writing was the first skill that popped into my mind. I am by no means a writer material, but writing has always been a great resource of pleasure. I care very little if anyone is actually reading or following my blog. It’s just something I enjoy doing.

- So I have decided to write and stick to it, but inspiration was finding it hard to reach my door, at least for today. So I went blog-shopping. I started with my friends’ blogs, and thought it is a great channel to keep myself abreast with the latest development in their well-beings too. However, it seemed like their blog-spheres are drying up. Is it because they are busy and happy with their lives and thus eliminating the need to obtain attention via the virtual world? This thought led me into questioning if I am happy?

- And so I googled “happiness” and arrived at an essay which quoted a survey that says: If you are younger than 33, the chances are you have not experienced true happiness. It made me wondered if it guaranteed that we will find happiness after 33, with crying baby every night, school kids and their academic performances to worry about, thinning hair or receding hair line, metabolism slowdown which rapidly expands waistline, not generating sufficient income for retirement, mortgage debt, etc. And why does happiness has to be associated with age?

- Having thought about the list of unhappiness, which I can go on and on and on about forever,  I was horrified with all the gloomy possibilities. So I quickly went to Amazon and searched for “Happiness in books”. I was inundated by the sheer number of choices – The How to Happiness, Happiness: Lesson from A New Science, Instructions for Happiness and Success, The 18 Rules of Happiness… There are actually instructions and rules to be happy? I am not convinced that I will be happy after reading these books, although I am pretty certain these authors are happy seeing their bulging pockets by selling all these theories to lost souls.

- As I was browsing through the never ending booklist, I remembered an argument I had with my friend this week. Ironically,  it was also about happiness. He associated happiness with the city he lives in, while I associated happiness to work and things we do and the people we spend time with. But we eventually concluded that the people surrounding us play the most critical role in determining our level of happiness. So if we have a close circle of friends, a person we deeply in love with, we should feel happy eventually.

- In the end, I thought happiness could be a great essay topic. As I approached my laptop and started writing, I realised the time which I have allocated for writing had depleted greatly. I was surprised and wondered if I really had just spent an hour thinking about what to write instead of actually writing? But one thing I have known for sure, if I were still suffering from writer’s block, I could have written about better time management the next time.