Happy New Year!
At this annual calendar flip we often declare resolutions, goals, or intentions for the new year. While it’s completely arbitrary, it feels good to have direction with the yawning year ahead of us, and I’m just as prone to ascribe hopes and dreams to the beginning of the calendar year or the beginning of a new birth year as anyone else.
Which is probably why I accepted a copy of Happy: The Journal for review. And since it’s a daily, dated journal that starts on January 1, today seemed the best day to share it with you.
On its own, it can be a book to put happy thoughts of each day. Or, you can use the prompts that accompany each entry, usually following a theme each month, to direct your journaling a bit more. The pages are pastel and the lines are spaced wide, which I think makes the idea of daily journaling and introspection a little less daunting.
Perhaps the one detractor to this journal is the binding. When will publishers think of how a book will be used and bind accordingly?! A lay-flat binding, like actual notebooks and journals, would have been preferred, but lacking that a spiral binding would make the journal much more user-friendly.
Reading the introduction, I realized that there is a book that preceded the journal, and I thought it might be useful to read that, as well. (The Kindle edition is only 3.99 as of this writing, so it’s an easy pick-up if you’re so included.)
Happy: Finding Joy in Every Day and Letting Go of Perfect was written by Fearne Cotton, a UK television and radio personality. While I’m not a huge fan of self-help books as a general rule, I found many feelings and passages in Happy that resonated with my own, far less public, experiences. The book has quite a number of activities in it, and the worksheets are printable from the publishers website. There are a bunch!
Overall, the point of both the book and the journal are to concentrate on the choices we have in our lives to concentrate and react to the events and people we encounter and encourages us to choose happy, joyful options over the negative alternatives. Because Fearne doesn’t set herself up as having all the answers, instead is quite frank about her struggles over the years and the ongoing ones of today, she’s a far more relatable source, like sitting down to a cup of coffee (or wine) with a good friend.
Disclaimer: I was provided a copy of Happy: The Journal in exchange for a review; no other compensation was received. All thoughts, opinions, and errors are solely my own. Affiliate links have been used throughout this post.
