Welcome to the Being Well Podcast. I'm joined today by Dr Rick Hansen. Dad, how are you doing?

Excellent, happy to do this. Today we're going to take a look at enjoying life, the final subpiece of the overall strength

of compassion that we're starting out the podcast series with.

I'm going to approach this a little bit more directly than I have some of these other ones because

I think that people look at

enjoying life as a strength to develop and they kind of like immediately raise their eyebrow a little bit at it.

I mean I know that in my certain kind of skeptical way I definitely do that. Why is enjoying life a

strength to develop rather than just like something that we should seek to do in our everyday experience.

Of course I want to enjoy my life, but what does that have to do with developing inner strengths

or becoming more resilient?

In the context of compassion, yeah, which acknowledges things that are hard.

It's really useful to look for those little authentic opportunities,

to enjoy something, anything, the more your life sucks.

Okay, yeah.

So, for example, I'm thinking back on times during the last year of my dad's life,

whereas you know I spent a lot of time at the medical

center where he was and so forth and there was a lot about that that made my heart very

heavy and it was hard to do there were a lot of things I had to deal with and it wasn't like it was the greatest time in the world.

And so it became especially important to have a little back and forth joke with the person at the cafeteria in the hospital who was

selling me a sandwich.

Or it was important when I walked out of the building late at night to then drive an hour and a half home to look up and suddenly see,

wow, there's a moon, there are light clouds, there's a star still there.

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