English: A happy person (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Last week I began looking into “Happiness” questions. I had several questions concerning that particular emotion and its place in our lives. The first of these to explore was: how does one generate happiness with regularity?
Before I could approach an answer to this query, I had to stop long enough, think specifically about the emotion and what it felt like, and define when I felt happy and what was happening in that moment. I’ll bet that most people have to do the same thing if they want to take a serious look at the subject.
I’m happiest when I’m with those I love and respect; when I can be totally relaxed and unselfconscious; when laughter and good-will wash across the group like the soft, warm surf onto a tropical beach; or, when I can go to sleep knowing that everything I’ve done that day has helped me grow as a person, given someone else solace and a shoulder to cry on, or helped someone else move forward in their life. Each of those things gives me happiness.
The problem—if you want to call it that—is that like most emotions, happiness is fleeting.
Some people say that it’s overshadowed by grief or sadness. In truth, those two emotions act as verification for happiness. How can one know one without the other? The negative validates the positive. It acts as a sounding board of sorts for the psyche.
Unrelenting emotion of any kind soon desensitizes us, leaving us without the same capacity for feeling the emotion as we did previously.
One of my old friends from university, for example, took his first professional position at Columbia University in New York City. He had a right to feel pride in that accomplishment as he began his new life. He wrote me often, telling me about his activities and cultural adjustment to the metropolis. After a year or so, he called me to say that he was taking another position in California. I learned that he could no longer tolerate the changes he was seeing in himself because of the environment in which he lived.
When I asked about the changes, he said that he’d noticed that he was getting hard-hearted and didn’t like the feeling of actually resenting the homeless and unfortunate of the city that he saw every day. He couldn’t continue to allow himself to feel that resentment any longer, because he feared that soon those would be all her felt. He’d decided that he deserved better in his life.
I agreed wholeheartedly. We all do. What we’re exposed to constantly becomes the norm. Without the balancing emotions, we lose touch with ourselves, as much as with anyone else.
We aren’t required to feel happy every second of the day. We need the undulation of emotion to keep us grounded, secure, and aware of our personal sense of balance. Regular happiness, though, is different.
To experience happiness is as simple as defining it for ourselves, putting ourselves in those situations which will engender the emotion, and allowing ourselves to feel happy. We do, after all, deserve to feel happy, just as my friend did. Only we can grasp it and bring it into our lives. Only we can determine how often we have that opportunity.
Related articles
- Thought Ripple: Happiness (2voices1song.com)
- Emotions (essencelifeblog.com)
- “I’ll Be Happy When…” Syndrome (iamtessa.com)
- Emotions On My Mind (dancingenchantment.wordpress.com)
- After looking within…then what? What do we do with what we see? (aclairavoyantjourney.wordpress.com)
- Let Go of Resentment, Anger & Bitterness (meditationsforwomen.com)
- The transformational power of trauma (stoningdemons.wordpress.com)
