Sitting here with my coffee cup in hand furiously studying for finals I can't help but try to find an escape for all the stress. My mind quickly drifts off to summer and all the expectations that come along with the physically painful heat, blue skies, beautiful beaches, and most importantly, free time. Time. To do everything. To do nothing. I begin to get giddy just thinking about it. Then, in typical scatter brained fashion my mind starts to ponder probably one of the most talked about and widely discussed questions, "What makes me happy? What is happiness? Why am I always fighting so hard for it?"
I thought about it and quite honestly there are a few points I want to make on the subject:
Quit judging me for staying true to my happiness...can you do the same?
Honestly, just stop. What makes one person "happy" or simply content with their lives is not the same with all of us. Please try to understand. We are all so tremendously and interestingly different. Each and everyone of us molded and shaped through our experiences, each with our own interpretation of reality. Subjecting people to one specific standard or widely accepted notion of what it means to achieve fulfillment will only lead to a deeper feeling of emptiness. Seems like we are in a constant race to impress the people that don't give us the time of day, seems like we are stuck in this infinite cycle to achieve the ideals that are imposed upon us by fictitious standards and hollywood notions of what it means to be happy.
I don't know much about what it means to be truly happy, but I know that five more minutes of sleep in the morning, falling in love with a song for the very first time, a smile on a child's face, a jolly old man striking up a conversation with me on the bus, eating a cookie and pretending it didn't happen because maybe then the calories won't count are all the things that make my day a little better. These silly things make my life a little brighter. Even if it's fleeting, it's worth it.
Maybe living in the moment and truly experiencing every moment of life is what makes us truly happy. Maybe really feeling something without constantly pondering about the future is something that we should experience every once in a while.
What's the deal with always being happy?
Seriously though! Like, why? What's wrong with being sad? Emotions are meant to be experienced and they are entirely dependent upon one another. They are mutually exclusive. Without sadness, there cannot be happiness. Without hate, there cannot be love. Without fear, there cannot be confidence and ease. So if you want to experience happiness that is deep and lasting you must be willing to open yourself up to heartbreak and unhappiness. We all want fire but we are all afraid to get burned.
Learn to be ok with your feelings. Learn to be ok with not having a good day. Understand that no day will ever be the same. As much as you may want it to be, it won't. Learn to forgive yourself. Because we are all messy humans striving to become this inexistent standard of perfection. Learn to learn from the bad days. And if you make the same mistake twenty times, well sometimes that's just life. How lucky are you to have twenty experiences to learn from? How lucky are you to be sitting there, wherever you are, reading these words.
Happiness is great and it feels soo soo good. But it's funny how all the moments that inspire change in us and that we remember the most are not those where we were blissfully smiling. The moments that have the capability to change life as we know it are those moments that we wish to never experience again. Those times where we are thrown into the rollercoaster of life and pushed to change the course.
I guess what I am trying to say is that so many of us are constantly living in this preconceived future that we have created in our head for ourselves. And there is nothing wrong with shattering that image and creating a life where we enjoy every moment. Yes, always be mindful of the future. But don't waste all the moments you have now just worrying about the possible moments you might have later. Learn to not be fearful of whatever it is that inspires something in you.
Understand that we are all to busy worrying about ourselves to have any right to tell you what you should be doing with your life.
Live simply,
Ersi Dani
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