Happiness

Happiness is such a beautiful emotion. You don’t have to put in much effort to feel it. All you need is that feeling from within.

Try it. It is really simple. Think about any good memory and smile. See - not that tough.

Good times and bad times are both part of life. But to live a happy life, you need to find the positive emotion in every situation. Even if something arrives out of nowhere, don’t panic. Greet it with a smile, look back honestly at where you went wrong, try to fix it, and there it is - you will find yourself smiling.

The most important thing is to enjoy your life. Don’t regret the decisions you took. Learn from every wrong one and promise not to repeat it. Actually laugh at your mistakes, and you will see the sheer silliness of some of them.

At the end of the day, life is about being happy with who you are. And I feel we are so blessed to have parents who support us regardless of what we are going through.

Nobody can hand it to you

Believe in yourself. Have faith in your abilities. If you want to be happy, the effort has to come from you.

No one can hand you a mixture made of all the happy emotions. You have to feel it from inside. Very little is needed to make a happy life - it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

I want to say something about that, because “happiness is a choice” gets used carelessly and can make people feel like a failure for having a hard year.

There is a difference between mood and orientation. Mood is not a choice. Some days arrive heavy for no reason you can name, and no decision fixes that. Orientation is a choice - what you look at, what you keep returning to, whether you go looking for the good thing or wait for it to announce itself.

You do not control the weather. You do control which window you stand at.

Sadness has a job

If you think you always stay positive and yet still seem to attract sadness, there is one thing you may not have understood: happiness loses its meaning if it is not balanced by sadness.

You have to experience sadness to taste real joy. Contrast is not a design flaw in life. It is the whole mechanism. A person who felt nothing but mild contentment for forty years would not describe themselves as happy - they would describe themselves as numb.

Laughing is the best calorie burner. And you don’t have to pay tax on being happy.

Being happy also never goes out of fashion. It adds a particular charm to a person.

Look at what is already here

One of the main reasons we are not happy is that we focus so heavily on negative thoughts and on everything we don’t have. I think if everyone started focusing on what they already have, they would be the happiest people alive.

This is not a trick to make yourself grateful for less than you deserve. It is just an accurate accounting. Most of us maintain a very detailed list of what is missing and no list at all of what is present, and then we wonder why the picture looks bleak. The picture is not bleak. The accounting was one-sided.

So start focusing on the good things, and start pulling positive lessons out of the negative ones happening around you.

That’s the mantra.

Small and often

One last practical thing, because happiness has a size problem.

We are taught to expect it in large pieces - the holiday, the promotion, the milestone. Those arrive rarely, last briefly, and are almost always slightly less than advertised.

The people who seem genuinely happy are running on something else entirely: small pieces, very frequently. A good cup of tea taken slowly. Ten minutes of music. A conversation that made them laugh properly.

Individually those look too minor to count. Collectively they are almost the entire thing.

-Kashish!!