Mash-Up

Everything good in life is one or more lesser things mixed together.

I’m one of those people who mixes my food. All of it. I dip my french fries in my ice cream. When I get a plate of dinner, it all gets mixed together. All my Thanksgiving leftovers go in one container.

I mix Skittles and M&Ms.

The point is, I think most good things enhance each other. Most of the time, if I encounter something I enjoy, I’ll immediately start thinking of ways I could mix it with other things I enjoy. If I’m reading a good book, I’ll think “Ooh, I’m going to take this with me when I go camping this weekend.” If I spot a movie I want to go see, I think about friends I enjoy spending time with who might want to see it with me. If I have a successful project at work, I like to talk about it with my children so we share in each other’s triumphs.

And it goes without saying that I like to turn experiences of all kinds into blog posts.

The point is, you do this too, even if you don’t think you do. Oh, you don’t mix your corn and mashed potatoes? But your mashed potatoes are already a combination of things: potatoes, butter, salt, a little milk maybe, etc. You’re not just eating carbon atoms – it’s mash-ups all the way down.

So mix a few things together! Find some new and exciting combinations of joys you never encountered before. Ten different things can be combined in hundreds of thousands of ways. That means if you can find even ten things that make you happy, you can have a new joyful experience every day for the rest of your life.