My relationship with Happiness has been an ever evolving one. I will start from my mid-teens… a time when you start to feel some of society’s overbearing reach as it tries to dictate to you what you should be, how you should act and what you should do with your life to fit in. At this point in my life, I held a view of happiness that I would ultimately carry into my mid-twenties. Happiness is a luxury. Put in another way, caring about what made you happy was for people who didn’t have ‘real’ responsibilities… people for whom the livelihood/comfort of others weren’t dependent on their actions and decisions… people who had reached a certain level of financial comfort which made their concerns different from those of the everyday man/woman. For me, a person with real problems didn’t have time to worry about what made them happy. If they could meet their responsibilities to family and their job, that was enough.
Most of the decisions we make in life are made through the lens of certain views that we hold about things. If you’re like I was and you feel happiness is a luxury, then the question of “what will make me happy” doesn’t factor into what kind of career path you choose, what jobs within that career path you accept, where you choose to live and sometimes who you choose to end up with. Such a person may choose a higher paying job because it enables them meet certain financial responsibilities, even though they wake up miserable every morning. They may choose to be with a certain partner because he/she ticks certain educational or religious boxes that have been dictated by their social circles as mandatory even though they have absolutely nothing else in common with said partner.
At some point or another in my life, I have been such a person. So what changed? Why did I go from believing happiness is a luxury to the belief I hold today, which is that happiness is a fundamental human right and everyone ‘deserves’ to be happy. I put deserves in quotes because as I always say, life does not give you what you deserve. It gives you what you demand. If you want to be happy, you are going to have to take control…but I digress. What changed? Well, a few things:
- A more conscious realization of the brevity of life: Fossil records tell us that humans as we know them have been around for about 200,000 years. The average person if lucky and in good health gets to live for about 120 years. That is such a tiny fraction compared to the duration of human existence. Simply put, life in the grand scheme of things is inherently short! Why spend the bulk of it being miserable? This leads me to my second reason.
- The need for authenticity: If we accept the notion that life is short, why spend the bulk of it living a lie, being anything less than our true authentic selves. Shakespeare was on to something in Hamlet when he penned the words “to thine own self be true.” There is an energizing phenomenon of feeling alive in every part of my being when I am staying true to my most authentic self.
- The understanding that choosing happiness does not mean the abandonment of one’s responsibilities: What I have just stated in the last sentence sounds like common sense when you write it out on paper, but as we know, what is common sense is not always common practice. My fear so far as I have put down words for this post is that someone will misconstrue my words as me downplaying the need to pay attention to a person’s personal responsibilities. If you have read anything I have ever written, you know that this is not the case. I would argue however, that as a matter of fact you have more energy to go after life’s challenges and face your responsibilities when you are truly happy on the inside. It is true that sometimes you may have to be inconvenienced for a while to meet certain responsibilities. Yes, sometimes you will have to make sacrifices for a period of time. But it should never be to the point where it completely erodes your sense of happiness. At that point, you become a zombie of sorts, internally dead, just going through the motions every day. That is no way to live.
The central idea of this post was taking control of your happiness. So I guess the only question left to ask is how I’ve managed to do that. First off, I’m still a work in progress. Secondly, I don’t have all the answers but here are two big things that have worked for me:
- Taking time to know myself better: In a sense, to know what makes you happy is to know yourself at a very deep intimate level. Spend some time alone if you must. Pay attention to the things that stimulate you… the things that create a spark on your inside. They are little bread crumbs on the pathway to your happiness. Be bold. Follow that trail!
- Every decision I make now is filtered through one question: will this make me happy in the LONG RUN? If certain choices are allergic to my long term happiness, they cease to be options for me.
In doing these two things, I have been able to take control of my happiness. Taking control of my happiness has become part of a broader philosophy of mine that living life to the fullest with exuberance and passion as opposed to just existing everyday does not have to be a pie in the sky dream or just something we theorize about. It can be achieved and should be sought after with every fiber of one’s being. One song that really espouses this for me is the OneRepubluic song “I lived”. I’ll let them have the last words:
Hope when you take that jump
You don’t fear the fall
Hope when the water rises
You built a wall
Hope when the crowd screams out
They’re screaming your name
Hope if everybody runs
You choose to stay
………..
I, I did it all
I owned every second that this world could give
I saw so many places, the things that I did
Yeah with every broken bone
I swear I lived.