TOW: Lazy versus Happy

There's one line in a song called "Is the Where It Ends," I always remember from the Barenaked Ladies:

She's like a baby
I'm like a cat
When we are happy
we both get fat


Now, this is not a post about body image, but this is about the link between being content, and being lazy.

I have been pretty lazy these last few weeks.  There have been bursts of craziness at work, and yes, it's been busy here and there, but the real issue is that when I get home, I have been turning on the internet tv,  maybe going to the gym, and just settling into a pattern.  I don't mind patterns, but I've been complacent lately.

And it's because I've been content.

A lot of great things have been happening.  Work is going well, I have low amounts of drama in my life, my family isn't calling every five minutes asking me to move into their basement because they miss me and generally things are pretty swell.  Life is good, and I've been wearing a smile on my face more often.

But what I have found is that when I get complacent, a lot of things start to take a turn for the worse.  I don't exercise as much.  Personal projects (I'm looking at you, iPhone game) get flung to the side and sometimes forgotten for a while or slowed down to the point where there's little progress.  You get lazy.

It's true that the devil work is in idle hands, but more than that, I sometimes find myself slipping into a routine where I go past relaxing, past 'me time' and straight into lazyville.

Oddly, I seem to thrive on chaos, conflict and disorder to propel me into something better.   The last couple years there has been a lot of change in my life, and I think it has to do with the fact that I've been striving for something better.  When I'm mad, or upset, or feeling weird, I feel the need to act, to make change, to do something, anything, to make things better.

When I get happy, it's hard for me to see how much better the quality of life could be if I got another job, got a raise, won some kind of award.   I guess I'm content when I have very little.

But happiness for me springs from being active, and doing things in the world.  My happiness comes from activity, not the absence of it.  So I guess I can be content with very little, but my happiness requires that contentment is never enough.  Happiness has to be a state of being, working, living, changing, and evolving.  And sometimes we don't evolve for the better when we try to change things, but I still think that's better than being a very specific kind of complacent.