A’isyah’s first experience with snow

Don’t you just love the joy of new discovery, best seen in a child’s first experience with something enjoyable? It was a year ago today that A’isyah first experienced snow.


I was browsing through my old photo archives and found that I have pictures taken exactly one year ago today, on 31 July 2008. It was on an outing to Mall of the Emirates, and we had decided to (finally!) enter Ski Dubai, the indoor snow park and ski slope. It took a while to get suited up, mainly because A’isyah refused to put on her helmet. I wasn’t about to let it slide, so we struggled to get her to put it on. Once inside though, she was quickly mesmerized by the sight of the white snow. She was too skitterish to try tobogganing and was just content to walk around, but she was fascinated by all the activity.

Four months later, on a return visit to Dubai, we went to Ski Dubai again. This second time A’isyah was more active, trying to throw snowballs and just playing around with the snow.



I can’t say I remember my first experience with snow, since I was a baby at the time, but the first time that I do remember was my family’s first winter in Sweden. I remember after the first snowfall my sis and I tried our hands at making a snowman out near the porch. It was a dismal failure. I think we managed something a few inches tall, because we underestimated the effort required to make one of those things. That, and the snow probably wasn’t right for making snowmen.

A’isyah had her snow experience at a pretty young age, but I have a feeling she’ll remember it. And it’s not just because of the pictures I think. Just a few weeks ago, she said to me that she wants to go to Mall of the Emirates, to play with snow. I told her that it’s very far away, and we can’t go there now. To which she responded with that favourite of kids everywhere: “Why?”

Maybe one day.

Tips from The Happiness Project for turning around a Bad Day

My last post was about a bad good day, so I guess it’s appropriate that the follow-up post is about a good bad day. Everyone has bad days. Maybe you had an argument with someone and that fouled your mood for the rest of the day. Maybe something didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to. A lot of times you can’t change the outcome of those events, no matter what you try.

What you can change, however, is how you let those events affect you.

Today I read a post at The Happiness Project blog about a good bad day. The author presents a total of nine tips to deal with bad days and how to turn them around to be good bad days. It’s all about how to make sure that the bad day doesn’t get you down too much.

Two tips that stand out for me are: “do something nice for someone else” and “act the way (you) want to feel”. I really do believe that kindness is its own reward. Don’t do good expecting to be rewarded for it, or even recognized for it. That’s when you get the real reward: feeling good. And when you act happy, smile, mix with other people, share light-hearted moments with others, you’ll start to feel happy. It just rubs off on you.

Go here to read the full list of 9 tips. I’d also recommend following the blog, cos it’s a fountain of good advice to manage happiness.

Here’s to happiness! May we all have more of it.

A bad good day

What the heck is a bad good day, you ask? Look at it this way: your experience of a day depends on your expectations for that day. So your assessment of whether it was a good day or a bad day depends on how the events of the day meet your expectations. Two persons experiencing the same events on the same day will very likely have different reactions to those events, and hence judge the day as good or bad depending on their point of view.

That’s the first part. Then there’s also the fact that two persons could have wildly different experiences on the same day, so their memory of that day depends on their own personal experience. That’s all too common. Just because you had a good day, doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t have had a bad day. That only makes sense. But sometimes we forget that.

Sometimes, we’re thrilled about our day, and overlook that our friend may have just had a bad day. So maybe we become insensitive. And what if we were in their shoes? What if we had a bad day, and our friend had a great day, and they’re sharing their joy with us? Would we want them to stuff it? Would we resent them their good day? A good friend shouldn’t dampen their friend’s happiness, even if they can’t share in it.

So what if we’re sensitive to the other party’s feelings? What if we know that our friend had a bad day? Maybe we feel bad about having a good day. Maybe we feel a little guilt at being happy.

And maybe we can’t bring ourselves to being happy.

That is a bad good day.