tam summed it up pretty well in her post the other day… there is a lot of bad juju flying around. lots of bad things happening to good people. whether or not there actually IS a lot of bad things happening, or if we’re just more aware of the bad things, is a completely different discussion than i wish to get into. regardless, i believe that we shape our world with how we live. i got a DM (twitter direct message for those of you not in the twitter-know) from my photography mentor today, challenging me to tweet positive for a week, and as i started thinking more and more about the implications of that, i thought hey, why not involve everyone on this?

that’s why today, i am proposing live happy week. one complete week of positivity. here are the rules:

1. no sarcastic, negative, cynical, or otherwise mean posts on any of our social media sites. this includes talking negatively about celebrities, our elected officials, or anyone/anything else.
2. if someone, someplace or something irks you, do what Jesus himself commanded and do your best to turn the other cheek. respond to negativity with positivity, in the long run that’s the best way to get back at people anyway… mwahahaha. (i kid)
3. send at least one encouraging note to someone each day of live happy week. it can be a tweet, a wall post, a hand written note, a blog comment… whatever. just something to let someone know that you care and you think they’re pretty swell.
4. call each other out, hold each other accountable. if you see someone falling a bit into the negative zone, send them a little (private) note and remind them what week it is.
5. pray for each other (if you’re the praying type) without agenda.

i am well aware that this is probably how we should act all the time. however, for now i think it’s enough to ask for just one week of it from all of you. and please know that i am not so delusional to think that we don’t all have bad days, i’m simply proposing we keep our online persona’s positive for the week. each of us (hopefully) have people we can call, private message, or speak face-to-face with when we get really pissed off or upset. additionally, i am not saying we should be anything other than authentic, if something bad is happening in your life and you need some prayer there is nothing negative about asking for some. this is more aimed at the constant negativity we all sling towards things/people/places in our life, even our laundry piles (tam… haha).

it’s based on the simple idea that just like creativity begets creativity, happiness begets happiness. what would happen if we all just acted a little happier? would we feed off that happiness, and make our own lives a little happier? for a week, i’m willing to find out.

how about you? who’s in?

if you’re in, respond on your twitter, your facebook, blog, whatever… just say once (really, we don’t need to flood this, haha) “i’m in for #livehappy week!”. that way we all know who’s in. you certainly don’t need to link back to this post, feel free to copy it word for word if you want and put it on your own blog/facebook/whatever. i could care less about ownership of this.