So today is International Day of Happiness, and if you are reading this any other day, I wish you a much belated International Day of Happiness — heck, let’s aim for this more than one day a year!
I’d like to point that you can’t just ‘be happy’ and I am not going to insult anybody’s mental illness or intelligence by suggesting fixes to become happy. It aint that easy. I’d just like to question the notion of what happiness means, as I am sure it means different things to different people. I’m guessing that a lot of people think that being happy means to be in a positive state of mind all of the time because everything is going your way. Dictionary.com defines happiness as;
These days, happiness means all sorts of things to me. I’d love to think of a world where I was in a positive state of mind all of the time, and things always went my way, but that is never going to happen. I now think of happiness as being able to be my authentic self, doing things that I enjoy, spending time with the people I love and knowing that despite best efforts, life is definitely a rollercoaster. Do you ride it and take the rough with the smooth, or do you cause yourself more pain by getting stuck in the mud?
Richard Carlson, author of Stop Thinking Start Living, taps into the idea that happiness stems from ‘healthy functioning’;
‘If you asked a hundred ‘happy people’ the secret of their success, none of them would say to you that they never feel negative emotions, or that they never have negative thoughts, or that their pasts were perfect. Virtually all of them. however, would tell you that even in the midst of their negativity they knew there was something better, something more important to them than the awful feeling they were experiencing at that moment. Their faith in this other part of themselves is the driving force behind their happiness(…) They know that studying their unhappiness won’t bring them happiness.’
So aside from the psychobabble, how can you find happiness in your life? I’m dropping a super stinky cheese bomb here but Vanessa King’s Ten Keys To Happier Living is probably a good base to start from.
Too often in the New Year or at any other point in our life we set the bar too high when it comes to goals, and we get cheesed off when we don’t achieve them. At least with something like GREAT DREAM, you have a consistent set of memorable goals that you can work on all year round, every year.
What makes you happy?
