“Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it will be this hard, I’m going back to the start” (The Scientist, Coldplay).
As we think about our 100 Happy Days Challenge and rewind back over those days, these lyrics seem entirely apt. Oh how we laughed at the thought it could be difficult to find a happy moment every day. Oh how we scoffed at the 71% of people who have failed to complete the challenge. Oh how wrong we were. It was hard, a real challenge – there were just days when work had been busy, it was bucketing down outside and you’re heating up leftovers in front of a bad TV movie…no matter how hard you try there just isn’t a moment that makes you feel particularly happy!
But hey, we did it, and for the last 100 days we have snapped a moment that made us happy! 100 days ago we were just back from a holiday, summer was here and we were enjoying the long days. Roll forward to now and autumn is well and truly upon us; the days are shorter and the weather’s wetter. But that’s not to say we haven’t had a good time. We’ve been to two weddings, and to the theatre twice. Booked two holidays, and went on one. We’ve been to restaurants in North, South, East and West London; some were Michelin starred, some just dirty take-away. We celebrated a year of not smoking and we treated ourselves to some new jewellery. One of us swapped glasses for contact lenses and the other got new frames. And we watched a lot of TV. But what did we learn? We learnt that our life may not be as exciting as some of our social media posts have lead our followers to believe, but do you know what? Life is pretty good and it’s nice to take some time out to not only reflect, but appreciate that. It’s something we don’t do often enough but are going to try and do more of in future! Maybe we’ll even go for another 100 days!?!?
Anyway, here’s a very brief video of our 100 happy days, summoned up in 1.5 minutes.