On happiness

I’ve had a weird relationship with happiness. I’ve both craved and shunned happiness. Chased after it and chased it away. Celebrated every high and wallowed in every low, attaching to both states as if they defined me.

Like most of us I’ve come to realise that the highs and lows of life have nothing to do with happiness. Highs and lows are simply that. Like the tide or the weather, things that come and go. Moods, feelings, phases, fortune, good times and bad.

Happiness deserves to be looked at differently; Maybe as a conscious a choice. We choose each day to welcome happiness or create it within our hearts and minds. It isn’t always easy: On days when the rent is missed or the relationship isn’t working or the black cloud blows in or whatever worldly thing occurs to pull us into a low state, it isn’t easy to choose happiness. And it’s okay not to.

Bypassing is when we spin the hard times into lies and tell ourselves, “everything happens for a reason.” We smile and say, “It’s a blessing in disguise,” before having a chance to savour the wound because we fear being seen as anyone other than an okay person; That if we’re not okay, there might be something wrong with us.

But happiness doesn’t require denial. It embraces grief and loss and despair. It sits in the background of the heart, aflame and ever-burning, only to fire up big and bright once the body and mind have digested the wounds and finished their healing.

And happiness is not a series of quotes on Instagram or a life lived on the beach. It can happen in the office and it’s there alongside the mundane routine of adulthood too.

I love seeing people happy because it reminds me that nothing is perfect, that nothing lasts forever, and that brief moments of happiness are beautifully fleeting. I’m reminded to cherish them without attachment. To celebrate the fact that they’re there, even when we can’t feel them. Even when we aren’t experiencing them.

Happiness doesn’t have to be a lifestyle. It isn’t a full-time job. It’s a subtle sweetness that never feels like how it looks in the movies or online.

I’m learning to savour it.

This post was originally published in 2018 in Byron Magazine under the title, “How To Savour Small Moments of Happiness.”