Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Happiness Defined

On his blog, a friend of mine recently posed the question "What is happiness to you?" and asked people to leave comments with their answers. What was initially going to be just a quick answer turned into to something a bit longer, so I thought I would expand on it a bit further and post it here. (That way I can check "blogging" off my list for the week)


To me, happiness is...
...laughing with friends
...being loved
...crawling into bed at night after a busy day
...seeing the sun rise on the snow covered Rocky Mountains
...a bowl of ice cream 
...a good cup of coffee
...flocks of Canadian geese that take over the city in the winter (I'm weird I know, but they make me happy)
...little kids that say random things (A couple instances that still make me smile months later- A 5ish year old boy at the bike track referring to his grandparents as G-Ma and G-Pa and a 3ish year old boy at the Body Works exhibit after discovering the body in the exhibit had a belly button exclaimed "I have a belly button too! Look!" then proceeded to lift up his shirt to show his grandma)

I could go on and on, but I'll stop there, at least with things that make me happy. I'm the "glass is half full" kind of a person, so there are lots of things the make me happy. In general though, I think happiness is a decision. You can choose to be happy because of your circumstances or in spite of them. I think in general we tend to focus on what we DON'T have, things that other people have that we want and that we often see has the key to being happy- "Once I have that job/relationship/house/car/etc then I'll be happy." Thinking that way will always leave you wanting more. 

Every coin has two sides though- so the key to happiness, or at least my happiness, is focusing on what I DO have- health, family, friends, a warm place to sleep at night, food to eat, clean water to drink, etc. 

Its up to us to decide what we want to focus on in our lives and the attitude we approach things with. If we let the bad stuff ruin our day, depend on the really, really good stuff to make us happy, or be happy in the small things - its all up to you. My secret to being happy is by getting it in small doses instead of waiting for the big things to happen. 
What's your secret?