Blogging is not procrastinating when students don't show up to office hours.

I think a lot of the discontent we often feel comes not from the fact that things are going poorly, but rather from the fact that they're not extraordinary. I've been thinking about that a little lately. I can say with all honesty that I consider myself a generally happy person, that I'm optimistic about the future, that I'm content with where my life has gone so far and therefore have every reason to be confident about where it's going.

But sometimes I have this nagging fear about the future. I do not fear that the future will bring incredible hardship. I mean, sure I worry about potentially calamitous events occasionally. What if I can't find a good job when I finish grad school? What if someone I love is killed in an accident? What if I get injured and am never able to run again? What if I never get married? What if I do, but find out that I can't have kids? But the truth is, as hard as any of these things might potentially be, were they to actually happen, I have confidence in my own resiliency, and I know I would learn to live with it, that I would still be able to be a happy person.

My fear is not that the future will be hard, but rather that the future will be more of the same. I am less apprehensive about finding a job than I am about learning (as I suspect I will) that even in my dream job there will be days when I want nothing more than to be doing something else. I think plenty about the possibility of not getting married, but I think at least as much about how if I do get married, an awful lot of it is going to be pretty mundane, maybe even a little boring. That living in a marriage is an awful lot like just living.

So that's what I like about this philosophy (don't just click on it - read it. It's not very long). I think that learning to be happy in life is not about making your life better, but rather about learning to appreciate, and enjoy, the perfectly average.

Any great friendship I've had has come from a lot of average conversations, sprinkled with the occasional extraordinary conversation as well as the occasional awkward or dysfunctional one.

A great occupation generally just chugs along most of the time, and every once in awhile you hate your work and just want it to be over, and every once in awhile you have an amazing experience, and you love the job because all those average days are completely worth the occasional extraordinary breakthrough.

A happy family is one that is just comfortable being together. Sometimes you fight, and sometimes you have a blast, talking or teasing or doing activities. But mostly you are just happy living your everyday lives in each others' presence.

When we look at life as a series of peaks and valleys, life appears unstable. We feel discontent when we are not at the peaks, and we feel doomed in the inevitable valleys. I've often thought that contentment in life comes from learning to remember the peaks when you are in the valleys, but I'm not so sure that this is the most effective way to approach life. I think that if we stood back from life and looked at it objectively, we would realize that those peaks and valleys, which are the most memorable to us, are also the least frequent, that most of our life is perfectly average. And by learning to notice and take pleasure in the average, we won't take up so much of that time worrying about the valleys or feeling discontent because we aren't at the peak.