How Do You Lighten Up?

NC IntraCoastal Waterway view taken at Wrightsville Beach in August 2012.

Today, I could write about the news here in the U.S. of an alleged murder confession via Facebook and discuss the implications related to social media and our society at large, but, instead, it’s the weekend, and I’d prefer to stick to lighter subject matter.  I hope you won’t mind.

Let’s see…light, trivial things.  What are some of your favorites?

I’ll make a confession of a few things that provide me with a lightness of being:

• Wrinkle-free, iron-free shirts often lighten my stress load during a busy week.
• The fragrances of Volupspa candles can quickly lighten my mood.
• Hearing The Fresh Market’s classical music being played when I enter a store always makes me feel light in step as I shop and stroll.
• I usually need only one glance at the North Carolina IntraCoastal Waterway (ICW) with its marshes to feel lighter (check out the photo that accompanies this post to see an example ICW view).

According to Wikipedia, in his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, author Milan Kundera “challenges Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence (the idea that the universe and its events have already occurred and will recur ad infinitum)” and puts forth an alternative theory – the idea that “each person has only one life to live, and that which occurs in life occurs only once and never again – thus the ‘lightness’ of being.  In contrast, the concept of eternal recurrence imposes a ‘heaviness’ on our lives and on the decisions we make…”

What about you?  Does your life feel light or heavy these days?  What are the things that immediately lighten your load?