Happiness is fleeting. I have been told this my whole life. Happiness comes into our lives as quickly as it slips through our fingers. Life gets hard, and bad things happen. We will have moments on top of the mountain, and we will have moments in the rut. But I am not convinced it is that simple. I think it goes deeper than that.
By this standard, everyone should have relatively equal amounts of happiness and misery. Take a look around you, and you will realize how inaccurate that is. Some of the most miserable people have everything, and some of the happiest people don’t. It has nothing to do with their current life situation – it has everything to do with them.
Maybe happiness isn’t that fleeting, maybe we just don’t know how to appreciate it when its right in front of us.
We see our happiness, and we want more. Good things happen to us, but there are better things that we want to happen. We see our life but our friends lives look better on social media.
We have become a society wrapped in our own greed. And when we find that our greed for material things cannot be satisfied, we replace it with greed for the perfect life. We need to have the most elaborate proposal, the most pinterest worthy holiday dinner spread, the mother that can manage all. We run ourselves into the ground trying to chase this perfect picturesque life that we don’t even want only to wonder why we are left feeling miserable.
Bad things happen and we push through them, and they make us stronger and more resilient. But then good things happen and we brush them aside. We don’t take the time to see what is right in front of us. We have so much, but we push it aside because we don’t think it is enough. We are try harder than ever to capture happiness, and all we get is this feeling that there should be more to life. There is, we just can’t see it because it can’t be bought in a box or posed in an Instagram post.
It is right there in the midst of the messy part of our life. It is right there in the moments gone forgotten. It is right there waiting for you to stop looking for other’s to approve of your life.
You don’t need the world’s stamp of approval, you just need yours. Let that be enough.
We have lost sight of the life that happens in the margins, the life that happens when social media isn’t watching, the life that isn’t perfectly cultivated at our fingers tips. We have lost sight of what it means to be alive, because the best things in life can’t be planned, they just happen.
It is a hard thing to be human, it is a very hard thing. It becomes even harder when we refuse to let ourselves be human – messy, unsure, imperfect. We are human. We make mistakes. We have no clue what we are doing most of the time. We feel things deeply, sometimes too deeply. And we are forever haunted by this voice that tells us we are not enough, that we will never be enough. Silence it.
Let life your life with its messy imperfections be enough. Let what you have be enough. Let the things you do be enough. Let who you are be enough, even when you believe that you never will be.
Be messy.
Be imperfect.
Be real.
Be you.
If you don’t, you will spend your life chasing someone else’s happiness. Chase your own happiness. No one else but you can decide what your own happiness is. Chase your dreams relentlessly, and always believe that you are capable of more. Be complex, be confused, be chaotic, be content – be human.
Your life is beautifully imperfect, and that is enough.
So, I’ve been thinking about this whole being happy thing, and I feel like people get lost when they think of happiness as a destination . . . We’re always thinking that someday we’ll be happy; we’ll get that car or that job or that person in our lives that’ll fix everything. But happiness is a mood, and it’s a condition, not a destination. It’s like being tired or hungry, it’s not permanent. It comes and does and that’s okay. And I feel like if people thought of it more that way, they’d find happiness more often.” – One Tree Hill
Photo Credit: Erwin Blumenfeld
Photo Credit: Lori Rensink
These Days 