#Nerdlution Day 2: Conceptual Happiness

I'm going to exchange today's scheduled exercise for composing another blog post because it makes me happier. Go Nerdlution.

Yesterday's list of things that make me happy was a combination of both things and experiences. For today's list, Part 2, we're going to go a bit more conceptual.

Slightly More Conceptual Things That Make Me Happy, in no particular order

1. Autonomy.  Independence, determining one's path, making decisions based on the sum total of your years of knowledge and professional expertise. I own my own home, my own car, I am responsible on a daily basis for many young adult lives. I make decisions for myself, my own well-being, my own future and the future of my four cats. What gets in the way of my autonomy will be discarded and circumvented. Asking permission does not a happy state make.
2. Choice. It's all about deciding for myself, not because convention dictates so. I select, I pick over, I sort through, I weigh the pros and cons, I am the decider. No one else.
3. Creativity. As soon as you ignore whatever is at the heart of expressing one's own creativity, or let it lay dormant, or suppress it, happiness diminishes in droves.
4. Loyalty. To principles, to relationships. Administrators throughout the country play leap frog from district to district, questing for their own superintendencies. And even then they jump once again. Many school district employees no longer feel their employer's loyalty. At the heart of our educational reform woes is a lack of loyalty to one another, to best practices in spite of standardized testing, to the best interest of the student as a person. We'd all be happier with a lot more expression of loyalty.
5. Prosperity. Having enough, food, shelter, transportation, to feed the cats, to buy medicine, to buy books, to go to movies, to travel. Gratitude holds the hand of prosperity.
6. Intelligence. Knowing stuff makes me happy. Being with other people who know stuff, no matter their age, bliss.
7. Language. Without language we would be utterly lost. Language development is a marvel. Think of your brain deciphering and constructing language, the fact that we can talk to one another, think to ourselves, refer to the past, present, and future, express the imagined and the real, learn other languages, create our own languages, hear it, see it, express it metaphorically, what can language not do?
8. Music. The language of emotion, mainlined. There you go.
9. Freedom. This or that. There or here. Take out or home cooked. Dog or cat. How 'bout both? Single or married. Live alone or in a commune. Good or evil. Some or all or none. FB or Twitter. Lady Gag or Madonna. Fat free or full of fat. Marvel or DC. Yankees or Mets. Physics or chemistry. Flute or saxophone. Stewart or Colbert. Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan. The Kite Runner or A Thousand Splendid Suns. Gandalf or Galadriel. Well, you see where this is going.
10. Love