Happiness, The Matter of Attention?

But what if I don’t need to search for happiness…

What if…

I’m already happy?…

What if…

I’ve been happy this entire time and just stubbornly refused to see it, to admit it?…

I recently caught myself remembering some nice spring mornings, when I’d sit by my window and read or write, with sunshine caressing my face and birds chirping in the background cacophony - a magical combination of being in the state of flow and also at peace…

Somehow, for the longest time, I’ve refused to admit that I have had plenty of such nice moments in the recent years; worse yet, I’ve neglected to notice happiness in those moments.

I’ve refused to admit that maybe I haven’t actually been only unhappy and depressed - maybe I was just too afraid, too unwilling, to accept the happiness available to me here and now, as if thinking that if I accept it, I’d be settling, and thus somehow waiving my right to have anything more…

What a silly fear! And yet such a strong one…

(SN: The lamp next to my bed shone brighter at those words, as if a reflection of the light bulb that turned on in my head)

But what if I’ve been going about it all wrong?

What if I’m such a perfectionist that I’ve set an unrealistic definition for happiness as a complete and utter absence of any negative feeling or moment in life? Yet having those feelings is n-o-r-m-a-l:

Because being tired doesn’t equal being unhappy,

Nor does feeling unfulfilled and lonely,

Nor searching for more,

Nor disliking my job

— they are all just attributes of my reality, and their presence doesn’t preclude happiness because happiness is everything else;

Because happiness isn’t about what you have - it’s about how you feel about what you have;

but more specifically, it’s about how what you feel about what you have compares against how you expected to feel about it.

I don’t think I ever stopped to think about my criteria for how to recognize I already live a happy life… Have you?

Happiness isn’t some massive moment of joy - it’s the aggregation of all the moments of peace, excitement, anticipation, pride, pleasure, flow, and so much more;

And no, it’s not about forcing yourself to find joy in the mundane - it’s about realizing that the mundane is perception and we have a choice for how to see it.

It’s not about finding time or making effort to have more moments of joy but about recognizing that they are already all around us, just waiting for us to step into them - they don’t need to be found, they just need to be noticed. Like walking home on a hot summer day, beads of sweat rolling down your nape and chest; you step into the shade of a tree, and you actually notice the cooling presence of the tree’s crown, and you pause, take a deep breath, and into your awareness sneaks the chirping of birds also hiding in the crown of that magnificent tree; you look up, and the tree itself is basking in the warm glow of the evening sun, and the world feels like a good place to be, and the world feels like home. You have arrived.

And it’s okay to want more - I want to want more - but I also want to appreciate what I have now.

I feel light. And I am ready and willing to be happy in the here and now, leaving behind the existential dread of settling for too little happiness or for too small a reason for happiness or for some insufficient level of achievement to be happy with.

P.S. This is an older post of mine but it serves as the perfect intro to a longer piece on happiness I’m currently working on, so stay tuned.

P.P.S. The image is from my illustrated poetry book “Ode to Hope and Despair.”