happy healthy yogi

just do it...

This is me, Maya Z. (The human one).

I am 25 (26 in exactly one month). I live in Toronto with my fiance and our cat, Charlie, in our lovely little semi. I'm pretty much your standard gal - done school, working a job that has nothing to do with my liberal arts degree, socializing at night to balance it all out, etc.

While life is generally fantastic, I know it could be better - to clarify, I could be better. I could be happier, I should be happier, especially given how lucky I am. The truth is though, most of the time I feel, well, overwhelmed and like I can't keep up with it all. Some days I think, "is this really it?.... guess so, and there it goes". It's not that I'm unhappy, it's just there are things I know I can work on and that's why, when I stumbled upon The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, something hit home.

"One April day," Rubin writes, "on a morning just like every other morning, I had a sudden realization: I was in danger of wasting my life. As I stared out the rain-spattered window of a city bus, I saw that the years were slipping by. 'What do I want from life, anyway?' I asked myself. 'Well... I want to be happy.' But I had never thought about what made me happy or how I might be happier." Bingo. Rubin nailed it. "I grasped two things: I wasn't as happy as I could be, and my life wasn't going to change unless I made it change. In that single moment, with that realization, I decided to dedicate a year to trying to happier."

Inspiration came from those first few pages. Without reading even one chapter more (although I did read it all, twice), I knew that I needed to finally embark on my own happiness project.

This blog will be dedicated to just that: one year of me working on being happier and healthier (this is key because I am not happy unless I am healthy) - you know, the 'mind, body, soul, run a marathon, conquer a fear or two' type of thing. I'm going to keep to her format (roughly), dedicating each month to a new area of my life. It's not going to be easy, but I suspect it's going to be fun and perhaps, as in Rubin's case, even rewarding.

Welcome aboard - comments, suggestions, general musings about life are more than welcome! :)

mxo