Happiness and I

We spend our lives looking for happiness. The paths we choose might be different or the ways in which we seek it might vary from time to time. From those who choose to work hard to achieve dreams and through it happiness to those who ignore responsibilities and lean back to enjoy and feel happy, the goal is still the same whether we know it or not. To be happy.

Through different phases in our life we choose different goals whose achievement we think will bring us happiness. But as time goes by and we grow older and wiser we realize that the culmination of our achievements might bring us satisfaction but happiness is altogether a different matter.

It cannot be achieved.

It can be cultivated.

It can be understood.

It can become consistent when we realize that it is a state of mind but it is not to be achieved, it is to be cultivated.

Sometimes I wonder why my parents did not teach me that happiness was not the goals we set for our lives. That it wasn’t the getting of top grades or getting a good job or getting married or having kids alone. And then I realized that there is no way to explain that it isn’t the achievement which brings us happiness, it’s the living every day that is happiness itself and that cannot be taught it can only be experienced.

To me, after four decades of life, happiness is the simplicity of living life itself and the joy that comes from freeing your mind from the past and the future and enjoying the here and the now. To me it’s cuddling up with my daughter at night after a long day and girlie talking about how terrible the day was or about the little bite of food my nephew’s grubby little paw decides to feed me at the dinner table. It’s not about buying a certain piece of clothing, its wearing it again and again in a gazillion ways. It’s not about a movie I go to watch on the weekend, it is about the experience of planning and dressing and getting there and laughing at the quantity of the snacks and whispering throughout the movie.

Oh it is so the smaller things in life that bring you happiness and when you learn the happiness of the small things the big picture automatically becomes rosy and life becomes awesome. It becomes a series of small happy events in any given day that shed the perfect light on your day. So much so that even the heartbreaks and the challenges only go towards shedding light on the collateral beauty of this experience we call life.

So let’s stop wasting our time waiting for those big things to happen that will bring us our projected image of happiness and instead reach out for the hand of a sibling or a spouse or a child and tell them you love them and are blessed to have them in your life.

Reach out to a friend and plan on going out and having some cheap street food and make goofy jokes and laugh on nothing in particular. Or just take a hot shower and cozy up in bed with a beloved book and push everything out of your mind because it is always the small things.

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