“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.” — Anne Frank

I feel like it shouldn’t be so hard to be happy.

Happiness should be one of those things granted to you by life– Like the ability to breathe.

However sometimes I feel like I get so caught up in looking for grandiose happy moments that it keeps me from appreciating the small simple moments that happen daily.

Things like the the train running express directly to my stop in the suburbs, sitting in the sun room with my roommates laughing about silly things or waking up to the sounds of a snoring dog.

Lately I’ve seen the hashtag “100HappyDays” floating around the vastness of the interwebz on simple picture posts about pies, flea markets and unpacking moving boxes and I was intrigued by the idea of these small tokens of happiness.

My intrigue led me to Google the hashtag and I found a website by the same name.

The concept is simple; be happy.

Find the happy in 100 consecutive days without giving up.

One of the main excuses for people not completing the task was a lack of time.

The hecticness and stress of a busy schedule cause most people to miss the things keeping their lives from being a complete mess.

Or maybe I’m projecting?

Regardless I liked the idea of finding the small and the less obvious and signed up for the challenge.

However because I’m a writer and I’ve been going through a small bout of writer’s block I’ve decided not to only photograph my happy, but to also take those moments and write about it.

So consider this a precursor to my hundred happy days and I encourage you, my dear friends, to take the challenge. Even if it’s not in taking a bunch of pictures and hashtagging the crap out of them, like many of us like to do, but just taking a moment every day to recognize the small, the insignificant, overlooked parts of our lives that make us smile every day.

Because those are the things that will shine in the moments when everything seems so dark.

So here’s to 100 happy days.