Day 361: I am very happy.

If there's one thing that has been an overriding theme of my year off the piss, it is happiness. Happiness of a Monday morning, happiness waking clear-eyed and headed of a Saturday or Sunday morning, happiness even in the face of not completely happy things happening - just happiness in general. And I think there are only really two things to which I can attribute this convincing and enduring swing to the sunny side: yoga and sobriety. Yoga (the Bikram kind in particular) is a magic tonic and curer of multitudinous ills. It has served to level my mind, teach me unwavering resolve, tone and stretch my body, and drastically improve my cardiovascular health and fitness (I no longer get asthma, I can jog pretty easily up a steep hill with next to no training, and I can sing a long phrase without needing to take a breath.). I think if everyone did Bikram even just twice a week, the world would be a distinctly better, happier and healthier place. Alcohol, on the other hand, is a liquid that, while potentially fun, brings with it a wagonload of trouble. For an evening of heady giggles and rubber limbs, we trade stomach trouble, dehydration, bad skin, weight gain, memory loss, brain damage, depression, significant money, and usually some kind of embarrassment stemming from our loose behaviour, not to mention whole sunny days that we miss while sleeping our evenings off. Put like that, surely no one in their right mind would touch alcohol. But we humans aren't always in our right minds. At some point in all our lives we need to blow off steam and do some crazy shit. Which is cool. But having gone from being one helluva crazy bitch on the alcohol front, to being as clean as a fresh fall of snow, and having felt the profound difference it has made to my mental state, body, skin, and general outlook on life, I can tell you I will be picking my moments for craziness very, very carefully in future. People write whole books on happiness and how illusive it is. I can (happily) say I am living happy pretty much every single day (and I sure as hell wasn't before). So if I'm going to mess with that, all I can say is, it had better be bloody worth it.