What is Happiness?

Simple Joy

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life. ~ Omar Khayyam

So I sat down tonight to do my weekly post and I hit the wall that is writer’s block. I played some of the mental games I normally do in this situation and nothing seemed to help. Nor did cooking a pot of curry, a shower, a fire or anything else. Finally, in a last attempt to stir my brain I Googled happiness and the first thing that popped up was a definition. So I decided tonight that I should answer that most basic of question, what is happiness.

Let’s start with the dictionary definition:

Happiness is a mental or emotional state of well-being defined by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. Happy mental states may also reflect judgements by a person about their overall well-being.

One of the places, as the quote suggests, where I find happiness is in nature. I love hiking and just being in nature. Natural quiet is something I seek out as our world becomes ever louder. To be able to sit in the sun and hear nothing but natural sound brings me incredible contentment.

We all have those moments and times where we find joy, pleasure or contentment. But we do not survive on just those moments, they provide temporary sustenance for our souls but my goal is to live in a state of happiness. I’m not naive, I realize that no person is happy every single second of their life. Things happen to us, those close to us are hurt or die. We make the wrong choice and get our hearts broken and sometime the vagaries of chance claim our day. Yes, these things will happen to all of us, they are unavoidable.

This is why I’d like to add something to the dictionary definition of happiness. Resilience, happiness is about feeling joy and contentment, but it’s also about resilience. Resilience is your ability to bounce back after a set back or even tragedy. First, it’s important that we know what happiness is, that we experience joy and contentment so that we know what state of being we’re chasing. Second, we need to become stronger people, we need to understand that we can survive the things that happen to us. We can not only overcome and get past them, but that we can be happy again. You can learn how to build all four types of resilience.

We must develop the tools and habits in our life to make sure we can attain happiness when things go wrong. We have to associate ourselves with people who make us feel good about ourselves. We need to smile, choose to be positive and to take the best side of any situation. We need to be grateful for what we have and express that gratitude. At a most basic level we need to stay healthy, we need to sleep enough, avoid stress, exercise and eat right.

If we do these things we can be happy, we can stay in a state of contentment and find joy and even when things go wrong we can find our way back and have happy days my friends ~ Rev Kane