How to be happy

Goal setting: life planning. Does it work?

I was going to write something about my goals and dreams because it’s a New Year. I worked through a great workbook from Elinor Wilde theWorking Mums Coach, about how to find the pause button, because there never seems to be enough time in my life. I also enjoyed an hour alone with a glass of wine and the Unravelling Workbook from Susanna Conway. I thought I needed to redefine my dreams and work out another action plan towards my goals. I thought I wasn’t doing well enough in my business and that I could rearrange things so that I was working more efficiently and providing a better service. I’ve become attracted to goal setting and affirmations and vision boards and training for entrepreneurs and mumpreneurs. But is that really who I am?

I want to be happy, but I am never truly happy these days. I am always planning something, goal setting or analysing something.  

I feel I should be writing about narrowboat life; how hard it’s been in the snow. How the diesel stove packed up this week and my husband spent hours taking it apart and chipping coke from the insides. How I took the boat to the water point yesterday, reversing through frozen plates of floating ice, only to find the tap is still frozen.

I could describe the relief and happiness I felt when we bought a small portable butane heater; or the tears I cried at 5.30am on the front deck last week. I was up early to go to the Boatshed conference in London when the propane ran out. While my family slept I used a mallet to free the gas spanner from the frozen front deck. I tried and failed to change the gas bottle and crouched in the soft, silent snow on the front deck in the deep, icy, darkness crying real hot tears. I just wanted my family to be warm when they woke up, and for my husband to be able to easily make a cup of tea. I was not sure that boat life is still for me.

I moved onto a boat in my late twenties when life was an adventure lived mostly in pubs, and no children depended on me.

I feel I ‘should’  be writing about narrowboat life on this blog, but I want to write about my own life; about my choices and trials and tribulations: And the elusive search for happiness.

For some reason, turning 40 recently has made me feel like very soon, I am going to figure everything out! When I do, I will let you know the answers.