Creating Happiness

I’m not a social media user. In fact, I tend to avoid them. My age is partly to blame. My generation is the telephone generation. While our parents used the telephone sparingly, my friends and I couldn’t get enough of it. My high school boyfriend and I spent whole nights talking in the dark while our parents thought we were asleep. That, in fact, was the most illicit behavior we engaged in!

The other reason I avoid social media is their public and self-promotional aspect. For many reasons, temperament and family of origin among them, I have always felt safer staying out of the spotlight. If nobody can see you, you are less likely to be disapproved of—whatever you are doing!

But I finally decided I hadn’t given my book “Small” the push it deserves, especially because I believe it would be extremely helpful for readers during the pandemic—so I began working with a publicity coach. Given that I’m a writing coach, asking for coaching myself was a huge leap for me. And when the first thing she asked me to do was to tweet several times a day, I wanted to run in the opposite direction.

But I heeded her advice, and since that first meeting, I’ve been tweeting three times a day about small and pleasure and happiness. The first few times felt awkward. Twitter was a foreign land to me, a very exotic foreign land, overrun with too many confusing visuals and signals and local customs. How would I ever find my way?

A week later, while I’m now far from fluent in Twitter, I’ve grown comfortable entering my own tiny territory within this foreign land and sending out messages to whomever happens to see them.

But my becoming more fluent in Twitter isn’t all that important. It isn’t important at all, in fact. What’s important is that in tweeting messages three times a day that encourage readers to find a moment of pleasure or beauty and to take time to absorb that moment, I’ve boosted my own happiness quotient.

Since discovering small more than three years ago, I’ve used it whenever I was aware of needing a lift. But to be honest, I hadn’t been practicing thinking small on a regular basis. Now that I am, I’m receiving its benefits throughout the day, every day. Which means that I’m enjoying tweeting, an activity I was adverse to just a week ago. That’s quite a large payoff for very little effort!

This morning I suggested in my tweet that readers find one small moment of beauty or pleasure in their home and concentrate on it for a minute or two. I’m hoping at least a few people have done that. It makes me happy that in the midst of Covid and more necessary lock-downs, I can help lift the spirits of a reader or two.