Contentment

What positive emotion do you feel most often?

Happy, excited, content, peaceful…this is a tough question today. Difficult only in the fact that I know how good I have felt lately, but I don’t know what word I would use to describe it.

When I’m at work—aside from when I’m dealing with annoying situations—I feel humor and lightheartedness. I work on a great team and there is laughter every day. The lightheartedness comes from non-work related conversations. Such as the one on Friday where my supervisor, her administrative assistant and I discussed whether or not a hot dog is a sandwhich. The illustrations her assistant put on next week’s schedule for national sandwich week caused a controversy when she put a hot dog on it. I told my supervisor to look up the way Five Guys serves hot dogs and then try and say a hot dog is not a sandwich. But I digress… It was a fun conversation. We do that a lot.

When I’m at home, I feel contentment. I don’t know that I would call it excitement, because a lot of time I don’t have the energy that excitement seems to require. Honestly, I think content really is the word for how I feel the most. In my backyard, sitting under the magnolia tree with my feet up writing here or reading a book…content. Inside when I’m sitting in my favorite spot on the couch (which is where I am now), with a yarn project, or like now, my iPad. I’ve got the dogs sleeping near me and something good on t.v…that’s contentment too.

Just being at home has that content feeling. Even if I’m doing something atrocious like folding laundry or washing the dishes, I usually do both of those tasks in front of the tv or with music playing. That makes it not so bad.

This feeling of contentment is only possible because of the absence of negative emotions. No stress, no anxiety. To be fair, sometimes there is anxiety. It is still a part of my diagnosis and it does randomly pop up sometimes to ruin a good day or weekend. But since the prompt said “most often”, the positive feelings win out. As they should.