This is such a tough question to answer as I feel so far away from this. And as I think about it, I identify so many “feelings” that I want to have. However, some of the “feelings” are not even feelings. So where does that leave this question.

My society and culture tells me I should constantly be happy. To be successful, I need to be happy all the time. This will make you happy. When you do this, you will be happy. And I have chased this construct many times. Once I graduate high school, everything will be good and happy. Once I graduate college, once I get married, once I get pregnant, once my child is sleeping through the night, once I lose 10 pounds, once I ….However, “once I” never worked, and this is not how emotions and feelings work. Emotions are transient. They come and they go. We are not meant to be happy all the time. We are not meant to be sad all the time. We are meant to allow our emotions to move through us, to process them, and to let them go.

So how do I define “feel” within my life. I think there can be an underpinning of “feeling” or state of mind within my life. It is a mood. What do I want my mood to be within my life? Whether my life is going well or I am having hard times, what do I want my mood to be. I am not saying that I won’t have feelings but how do I want to feel generally when I look at my life. And instead of being a bunch of feelings (or not feelings) when I started looking at this, I only need one. I want a mood of peace, of tranquility within my life.

Peaceful – a state of being calm, quiet, and free from disturbance, tranquility

Tranquil – free from agitation of mind or spirit

And when I look at this, it makes so much sense. There is so much bombarding us from the outside. For me, I took a lot of that conditioning and constructs and started bombarding myself from the inside. So now I want the mood of peace or tranquility, to be free from agitation of mind and spirit. That doesn’t mean that it is quiet all the time, that bad things don’t happen, that good things don’t happen but that the mood I have, the mood I bring to the situations within my life, is peaceful, tranquil, quiet in the chaos of modern life. And that is so not me on the inside, but what I want me to be.