Becoming SIMPLY HAPPY by Bird Trouble

This morning, I listened to a great session of TED Radio about being SIMPLY HAPPY. If you have the time ((find the time)) to listen to this. If you have the time to read my thoughts it triggered, read below. 🙂

Alexz here. Founder, maker and creative direction of Bird Trouble. Over the time that I lived in Mexico focusing on my art and traveling via Amtrak along California and to Chicago for almost two months, I decided to make note some of my favorite ways to live.

These are some actions in life that make me, and probably others like me, the happiest… :

• Traveling
• Having less material stuff
• Living slower
• Creating what I want to create
• Eating healthier, eating plants
• Practicing yoga
• Intentionally choosing my paths and my close relationships
• Giving effort to having true connections and real conversations
• Letting anger go
• Practicing kindness
• Opening my heart to more love

I made room for all of this in my life.  Now that I’m back in Chicago and living a more “fast” life, I like to remind myself what makes me the happiest.  This helps me not lose focus on what type of lifestyle I’d like to comfortably achieve.

It’s the holiday season. I’m up to my head in orders, tasks, and projects.  My social life is at an all time high because I live near my O.G. Chicago friends, I’m making a ton of new people every week, and I’m in way more social happenings through the Bird Trouble pop-ups happening and a part-time work schedule.  Opportunities is what I needed while I lived a slower life in Mexico and now that I have them, I want to balance them. Not get rid of them.

The work I do is exactly what I want to do right now, but just as I said, I’m finding that my need for finding balance again is becoming extremely important.  I made room for the ways I love to live, and I made new room for what I was missing, but now I don’t technically have as much free time as I’d like to have. At least, I don’t have the kind of free time I had in Mexico and this is strictly because the culture in Mexico is completely different than the culture in America.

How am I going to re-create a balance life for myself with the ideas I fell in love with when I was the happiest?

Over the next year, the goal is to make more time for what makes me truly feel alive and I plan to live in a way where I have to slow down more often.

As a lot of you know, my boyfriend James and I are working on getting a Bird Trouble ’78 Dodge Campervan MOBILE RETAIL STORE road-ready.

When the time comes to hit the road, we’re going to need so much support to keep us on the road.  This isn’t just to make us happy – this is to take Bird Trouble to the next level.  We want to join the movement of Mobile Shops, but through innovation and repurposing so we can be a platform for a) living fuller and b) sharing sustainable and meaningful goods through travel, lessons, and acceptance.

How you can join in the Bird Trouble Mobile Shop movement?

The Bird Trouble Mobile Shop will be used as a platform to spread the ways we truly love living because we know it will inspire and connect others like us to each other.  We want to meet you on the road.  We want to talk about simplicity and the importance of traveling, exploring nature, creating sustainable products for a consumerist culture, being intentional, and loving life.  We want to remember the connection and the ideas we shared.  We want to show you our crafts.  We want to share your story.

I’m currently working on a killer business plan and am going to start filming the Dodge Campervan’s renovation to share on the Bird Trouble YouTube channel. If you know of a ways that can help us fund our Mobile Shop business plan, please reach out to alexz@birdtrouble.com. Much love, Alexz Sandoval – founder, designer, maker of Bird Trouble