Today while driving to work I read a very intriguing bumper
sticker. It read: “ It’s never too late
to have a happy childhood”. Needless to
say my mind always needs something to ponder and with a 45 minute drive I
lowered the news radio I normally listen to and thought about that bumper
sticker. My thoughts quickly drifted to many
questions:
What makes me happy?
What is happiness?
How often are we meant to be happy?
Why is happiness so important?
Why is it so difficult to obtain or keep that happy feeling?
As I pondered it, I reflected on the moments in my life that
were the happiest. It was in those times
that I really felt alive, that my life felt like it had purpose and meant
something. Happiness defines us, in a
way we are exactly what we are happy about.
Our personalities, priorities, time, all is spent to fulfill some sort
of happy moment we seek.
Having young children reminds you of your own childhood, and
one of the first things parents begin to understand is how happy children
constantly are. They seek happiness in
every moment, this is why they cry easily too, because when they don’t get to
their happiness it is devastating. For
them the only expression left if something is not fulfilled is the emotion of
crying or throwing a tantrum. As adults
we ‘mature’ in thought and this brings about two fundamental changes in the way
we pursue happiness:
1)
We don’t pursue happiness as often – we begin to
realize that happiness is not guaranteed, therefore we limit our tries, and we
calculate our moves to effectively manage our failures.
2)
We become jaded and less and less disappointed when
we don’t get to our happy place – when we don’t get to our happiness we hide
our disappointment and emotion with a strong face, or a careless attitude of telling
ourselves, we really didn’t want it anyway.
So though we are all constantly seeking happiness, it
becomes an elusive element in our lives.
The main effort is not placed on the feeling of being happy but on how
we can get there. Therein lays our
problem instead of focusing on the moment of being happy, or in a happy state
we begin to tell ourselves, I will be happy when….
We begin to call these, goals, achievements, but we are just
masking the truth about setting destinations of happiness. Of course there is no harm in trying to
achieve success and pushing ourselves to become better in whatever realm we
deem important, the fault comes because we as humans begin to see those
destinations only. Our happiness is then
offset for another time, not the current moment, not every moment we are
living, not every experience we are having, but only those we are striving for.
This is the reason children can find happiness in just
playing with dirt, they do not care about the end product of playing with that
dirt, what they can build with it, or what goal they will achieve after playing
with it. They only care about that moment,
about that current state their mind is in, they are doing something they want
to do, and to them that is their happy state.
Sadly we begin to live our lives as adults and then we teach our
children the same thing that happiness is a destination, not every moment.
In our fears we tell them that happiness is found in
success. In better grades, in being the
best at everything, in putting rewards at the end only if certain conditions
are met. You will get ice cream if your
room is clean, which means happiness will only come ‘after’ you have achieved
some level or satisfied a requirement.
I am about to turn 40 and maybe this is my midlife crisis
talking or just my normal insanity. This
whole notion is crap, it’s full of shit, and honestly it makes me sick to know
that it’s what we teach our children.
Instead of learning from them, to live each moment and in a constant
happy state, we teach them that the happy state will only come if we accomplish
something.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying we should teach them to be
lazy; however there should be rewards, there should be celebrations at random
for no other reason than we have that moment.
It would benefit us, and them if we started to take away some of this ‘achievement’
based happiness. It would benefit us if
we ourselves started to enjoy moments of happiness at every breath, not because
our goals have been reached, but because we actually have this moment, this
particular second in time to let ourselves feel good about our journey at its
present state.
I’ll be happy when I get to high school, when I get to the
college I want, when my career is set, when I have money, when I have no
mortgage, when I retire, when my kids are set, consistently we push our
happiness away, instead of embracing it.
Happiness is not a destination; happiness is in every moment
of our journey. It is in fact our
natural state, when we take away judgments about ourselves, or comparisons with
others. When we focus inward, we find
that within ourselves there is a treasure of great happiness that we began to
ignore when we became ‘adults’ as we matured we buried that treasure even deeper. We forgot how to look up at the sky and
marvel at the clouds, listen to the wonderful sounds of the chirping birds, feel the wonderful/warm the sun rays hitting our face.
We forgot that it is our maturity that causes us strife, our intellect
that causes us stress, and most of all our inability to be satisfied with the
moment of time we are given, the present, to feel blissful in every
situation. The beauty of life is in
every second, and somehow we miss it because our attention is not in that
second but some hour/day/year in the future.
Happiness can be found in every breath, moment, touch,
glance, and smile, in the simplest and most natural way, all we have to do is
stop trying so hard.
