A little dose of happiness

Most of us are guilty of living for another day/time. Always waiting for the future. Tomorrow… next month… next year…. The time’s just never right to be happy today. Because today, I have work; because today, I need to finish this and that; because today is not Friday. ‘When I lose weight, I’ll be happy.’ ‘When I go on a holiday, I will be happy.’ But I know myself, if/when I lose weight, I will find some other reason to be unhappy. When I go on a holiday, I will come back guilty and fat and be unhappy again. Because as I have just discovered – I just don’t know how to be happy. I just don’t rejoice in teensy little happy moments, I don’t harvest them, don’t harness them.

I’ve always looked at happy people and thought how lucky they were – it was akin to winning a lottery prize or something. It is now slowly dawning on me that happiness is not an event. It’s not something that happens to you because you are lucky, not something you stumble upon because you are serendipitous.

A know a guy who keeps smiling all the time. He’s not extraordinarily good looking, he is not suave, sophisticated, or anything – but he smiles. And that smile, believe me when I say this, is the most contagious thing after conjunctivitis. I find myself smiling too when I meet him. It’s simple and genuine, not the ‘with effort’ smile I sometimes see on the faces of my other acquaintances, and on my own face, of course (my own smile appears to me to be ‘with effort and with pain’ like I am overdosed with ‘you no poo’ or something.)

When I was younger, I believed that I need to be beautiful, have a lot of money, be popular, and have the undivided attention of a handsome man to be happy. And because I don’t have all this, I must remain unhappy. But this man smiling man I mentioned, he doesn’t seem to have any of the items on this list (well, he may not be particularly interested in the ‘handsome man’ so scratch that). Then how does he look so deliriously happy?

I wonder where along the way we get this ‘attitude’ towards happiness. Children seem so happy, they smile a lot (they cry a lot too, but let’s discount that). Maybe it starts young, this inability to be happy. To whine, to crib, to look at the half-emptiness and never the half-fullness.

So, I am making a small vow to myself today – I am going to try to be happy. Why try – I am happy! See, this is already working! :) :) :)

I am going to smile, ‘smile even in my liver’ like in Eat, Pray, Love (if you’ve not read this lovely book – please do!). Yes, I am smiling in my liver and my gut and my kidney and my gall-bladder and… okay, I know you get the picture. So I am so going to do just that!

Signed
Happy-happy me
*All smiles*