What my wife has been teaching me lately.

As many of you amazing friends and readers know, I recently got married. My wife, Rachel Harper de Siqueira and I, just celebrated two months of marriage. It has been a fun and incredible journey so far.

I am experiencing a lot more in life with Rach than ever before. For example, I have never done the dishes so often in my life (just kidding! NOT!).

Jokes aside, we are watching different things together, eating different types of food together, experiencing new routines and workouts together, making new friends as a couple, and understanding what excites us as a team.

It has been eye-opening to me how much I can learn from fully leaving my preferences behind and striving to discover our preferences regarding fun activities, personal growth, spiritual-development, friendships, family, etc.

During this process, I have learned so much with Rach that I am falling in love even more with this woman now. She definitely makes my life better every day.

The most important thing that she has taught me in the last two months.

Among many valuable lessons that the wifey passed down to me, the most important one was to be happy, regardless of what you are doing. Rachel works so hard! But she works so happily as well.

I always believed that I had to work hard and that a synonym of hard work was suffering. Thus, to reap the fruits of hard work, I had to suffer! I needed to be miserable and fatigued of so much work so that I would deserve rewards. However, Rach is productive, effective, and determined at the same time that she is happy!

Of course, she has goals, visions, and aspirations for her long-term and short-term future, but she is happy now! This ironically helps her get to those future scenarios easier and a lot more naturally. She does not spend energy trying to jump from present to future to be happy: Her happiness with the present helps her flow from one to the other.

The Now.

Rach makes me get out of a state of anxiety that comes from an uncertain future to a state in which I do not just do my best, but also enjoy what is happening now.

Nobody is perfect, and at times everybody gets sucked in by the environment, expectations, or pressure. So most of us will catch ourselves many times completely absent from what we have in the present and solely be wishing things for the future. However, we do not have to be dominated by it.

Rach faces the same pressures, anxieties, uncertainties that you and I do, but in different ways. However, she chooses not to give weight to those unproductive thoughts and be happy in the now.

Studies of happiness in the workplace find that employee happiness can play a major role in organizational success. [1] This is also true for individual success.

Thanks wifey for helping me be more grateful for the present, for making me happy in the now, and for giving me content for a new article!

Let's all focus a little bit more on our now and less on waiting for happiness in the future. Things will flow a lot better in our lives in that way.

[1] http://www.freebook11.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Leadership.pdf

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