Ideas about Happiness…

The little things that build happiness. Happiness is the key word of life.  Happiness has probably different meanings for you, or my classmates or even someone in my family. To me, happiness has a clear meaning. It is the realization of our dreams. People keep repeating me that I have to be realistic, that life is not everything we want. I do not think so. I believe that if we don’t pursue our dreams, then happiness cannot be completely accessible. Happiness is not only about one thing we really want. Some people think money would make them happy, or getting a private island in the middle of the Caribbean for the rest of their life would make their life perfect forever. Happiness is not defined by how materialistic we are. It’s about enjoying little moments in life. It’s about enjoying the things you do and the events that happens in everyday life. Happiness is love, joy, laugh, smiles, emotions, tears, family, friends,… Nowadays people always want more. They are like donkeys. They have a pack of money floating in front of them and keep running straight in order to get it. Then they realize that time goes fast, that they skipped a lot of things around them. They find out other paths in life were possible for them to take. I was a lot like that. But life taught me that happiness is primarily possible if we enjoy little things in life. It is important to talk and remember about the past. It is important to imagine and see how our future is going to be and how we want it to be. But it is very important to live today! Live every single minutes. Enjoy everything. Have you ever watched Kung Fu Panda? One of the big quotes from that movie is the following: “Yesterday is History, tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift, that is why it is called the present”. I love that.  Those little details happening every day in our lives can make us happy. The sunrise in the morning, the birds singing, the water running hard on rocks, the wind blowing on the leaves, a little kid laughing, the ice cream that you eat during hot summers, the fireplace keeping us warm during cold winters, cats or dogs seeking for comfort on our laps, random people being nice to us, a “thank you” or a “you are welcome”,…There are so many things in life we don’t pay attention to.

Happiness is something that a lot of people don't believe in. Though, it's simple to find it. Yes, life is not always how we want it to be. Who said that everything was perfect? Nothing is. Life is an unexpected adventure. It’s shorter than we think. Bad and good things happen. Sad and funny stories come up every day. But no matter what, we have the choice to be happy or not. We are responsible of the personal choices we make in life. What if happiness was simply directed by those choices? I believe in that. The choices we make today influence our present and our future. It can be short or long terms choices. The main idea is: we, as individuals, are the one and only one who build our happiness. Yes, people around us will influence us. Yes, events in life will influence us. But we are the one who decide. We decide who we want to be friends with, what we want to learn, which path we want to take, right or left, yes or no, sorry or not sorry,... Happiness is determined by our own decisions in life. We can change anything. Anytime. Nothing is really done forever. We just have to be smart, stay who we are, and be simple in the way we live. Sometimes we are still looking for more happiness, we can get desperate, we then realize we are happy and life can go on. Some other times we realize it too late.

 

A smile can make my day. I like smiling. People often tells me that if there is a thing they often remember about me it is my smile. Smile is one of the key to happiness. Guess what... smiling is a virus. It is very communicative. It shows a lot. Does it make you happy to see people around you smiling? Doesn't it give you a little something inside when children or babies are smiling to you? Smile 30 minutes every day can make you live longer than expected, scientists say. It is good for our heart. It is good for our soul.

Happiness is thinking about what makes us feel good in life. Everybody has problems. Life is not perfect for anyone. But the way we look at our problems will definitely influence how happy we can be or want to be. I took a “Keys to College Success” class last semester. We talked about how some people have a creator mindset and others have a victim mindset. Creators tend to always seek solutions. They don’t give up. They think positively and try to find a way out. Victims blame others for their problems or mistakes. They think they can’t be happy either because they don’t deserve it or because people around them don’t do anything to help so the only solution is to give up.

 

In life, doors shuts and open. All the time. Some of them need a key. We have to find it. To find happiness, we always have to keep one door open. Sometimes we want to open one that we can’t have access to because it is not time yet. People try to force it. Rush everything is a bad idea. There is always a solution to everything. It takes times to find it. It ask for a lot of thinking and reflexing. It asks for patience. If a door shuts on us, we should not try to open it back. If we are the one that decide to shut a door, then we can always come back to open it and try again. What I mean by this metaphor is that when we want something to be happy, we can always find a way to get it. Happiness is accessible to anybody.

 

Happy people make people happy. I think I heard that in movie recently. I believe it is right. Seeing someone happy can usually makes you feel good. I know a lot of people, mostly of my generation, will say that with “love relationships” it is not true. I can love my girlfriend but maybe figure out that one day we don’t work together. What is the best? Stay together, fight to keep us together and not feel too happy because of our fighting and repetitive brake ups? Or is it best to let the person I love go away, because I know that she will be happier without me. It is hard to think about. Can you make someone happy? I don’t think so. I think that in a relationship, happiness comes from how people interact with each other. They create happiness between each other but they cannot make the other person happy. Happiness results from an interaction between the two persons that forms a couple.