The joy and delight we experience when we make new discoveries, gain valuable insights, see personal growth, take positive actions, nurture intimate relationships, or facilitate change for the better are moments we wish would never end. But we string ourselves along sort of like waiting for the weekend and on any given Wednesday feel a sense of despair as if Friday afternoon will never come… as I often say, weekends are amazing; how to survive what falls between, that’s the challenge.

So we search our souls, thirsting for meaning or maybe just a break from the intensity of the Monday-through-Fridays of our lives. For sustenance many of us, if we are lucky, are able to reach out to our loved ones and center ourselves inside concentric circles of family, friends, faith communities, colleagues and acquaintances. Others turn to physical pursuits like weight training, zumba, hiking, or cycling among a host of healthy distractions that challenge their external bodies and assuage potential internal struggles. Still others dive inward and through prayer or meditation, self awareness building or self help resources pursue and sometimes see the proverbial light. Then there are those who instead of fleeing the Monday-through-Friday life cycle, embrace a Monday-through-Sunday work week, burying themselves under often self imposed deadlines, responsibilities and inexhaustible lists of to be completed tasks. Most of us can probably see ourselves in any combination of these life scenarios and have traveled inside one or another of these based on our  circumstances and the season of life we are in.

But getting back to the moments we cherish, the moments we live for… how can we maximize them so we are more often than not tuning in to the frequencies that bring us joy and delight and minimize the noise? By being mindful and creating a heightened consciousness of what we want for ourselves and proactively planning them both in the abstract and the concrete, we pave a path toward a lived happiness that could very well transform what we call a life.