Happiness comes from your own actions.

Happiness is not something ready made.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions., originally uploaded by speckled_beckle.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions. ~Dalai Lama

Today I took a day for me. I didn't go to the store, I didn't have any set deadlines or a schedule of any kind.
I have been having an urge for the last several days that kept prompting me to meditate, but, unfortunately, I have been unable to do so. So, today, I went to a park.
I took with me a journal, a pen, my camera bag (that was still packed from the wedding on Saturday, where it doubled as my purse), and Barbara Ann Kipfer's "The Wish List", which I've had for years.
I read through it, cover to cover, and was able to update the wishes/goals that I have fulfilled, and was able to refresh my memory on some wishes worth having that I have forgotten about.

After leaving the park, I drove around for a good little while, taking back roads I haven't been on in years, weaving my way around town from one end to several miles outside the other.
Then I did an outdoor photowalk in the area around my house. Today's photo is an apple hanging in my grandma's tree. I also got some shots of a broken-down fence, a bee on a sunflower, and more apples, to name a few.

Here are some of the wishes from the book that I have added to my personal wish list:

• Keep a stash of Girl Scout cookies all year round
• Make a collage of all the fortune-cookie fortunes I have received.
• Sell my crafts at a crafts fair.
• Stand on the shore and roar back at the ocean as loud as I can.
• Study Buddhist and Hindu dharma.
• Save half a year's salary.
• Lie on the ground in a grove of sequoias --the largest living things on earth-- and look up
• Bequeath enough money for my survivors to toast me with champagne every year on my birthday.
• Reserve one night a month to go out with old friends.
• Throw a tailgate party for the homecoming game.
• Take part in a geological survey.
• Become a masseur.
• Read all the original Nancy Drew mysteries.
• Find inner peace.
• Take up yoga.
• Keep chickens.
• Stand in the center of the Colosseum in Rome.
• Backpack across Europe.

Those are just some of the new wishes (or I guess some of them are goals) that I rediscovered today.
Check out the book when you can; there are a ton of wishes on there that I'm sure you'll want to add to your own lists.

It was a rewarding day, over all.
I didn't get much meditation in, though I'm sure that there will be time for that before I head to the store tomorrow. (It was kind of hard to clear my head when there were children laughing and playing. Not that I have a problem with children laughing and playing, it's just counter-productive to clearing one's head.)

I think everyone should take a day and clear their schedules for some much-needed alone time.
Or at least a day of having nothing to do, or nothing to do by a specific time. =)