A Bliss List

Follow your bliss.  ~ Joseph Campbell

 bliss–noun

1. supreme happiness; utter joy or contentment.
2. Theology. the joy of heaven.
3. heaven; paradise: the road to eternal bliss
4.Archaic. a cause of great joy or happiness. 

Last night I was flipping through The Woman’s Comfort Book by Jennifer Louden for an idea of something good to do for myself. I don’t do that as much as I used to. I have learned some self-soothe and self-care skills.

I haven’t been doing them regularly lately. So the book has been taken out of the shelf and I am looking at it more again.I tend to flip pages and glance over them looking for an idea to catch my eye.

Last night I saw this. Make a bliss list. Joseph Campbell, when asked, what was his bliss, replied his wife.  

Okay, I thought, that’s a tough one. Some time ago I started trying to figure out what I loved. It took a really long time. I had some great ideas of what I loved. But being multiple meant that lots of me didn’t have the vaguest idea what they loved.

We spent lots of time at libraries. We watched lots of different shows. We read books. We watched other people. We looked at things online. We tried to find ourselves in what we loved.

We know to a lesser degree what we merely like. Rather than actually looking for things we like, those were usually things that we discarded from the love pile.

We know a lot about what we hate. What we hate we have always hated. We learned what we hated from the abusers and what they believed and valued and loved. We hate those things.

But what we have bliss about that is a puzzle. I really don’t know. We think of bliss as being something even higher than loving something. I’m not sure about bliss. I don’t know if I have even one thing to put on my bliss list.

Okay, maybe one.

I first heard this on David’s blog posting.

If Ye Love Me

Thank you David.