The
gauntlet that Trevor threw down was to define happiness in 100 words or less.
While I can do it for myself in 31, it probably would need a little bit more
context for anyone else.
I am not an eternal optimist. Part of this comes
from years of training to focus on identifying and managing risks; part of this
is personality. So setting myself the task of spending 30 days exploring what
happiness means to me was fairly daunting but probably long overdue.
My happiness project was simple: every day, I
had to write down at least three things that made me happy that day. I set
myself two rules:
1.
They had to be things that made
me happy not things I felt I should
be grateful for.
2.
They could not be the phrased
as the opposite of something negative.
Here’s what I learned:
Happiness
is not a zero-sum game. When you live in a country
where you are surrounded by want and deprivation, it's easy to start defining
happiness in terms of things you have that others don't. "I'm happy for a
warm bed when that homeless guy by the train station will be sleeping on a
stack of bricks tonight", for example. While there is a lot of gratitude
in that statement, there is also a lot of guilt. And guilt and happiness are
poor bedfellows. Defining my happiness relative to someone else’s want was simply not an option for me.
A
double-negative doesn't make a positive. Happiness is not the opposite of unhappiness. Avoiding the negative,
at best, will simply secure a neutral result. By only recording the happy
moments in my days I learned that true happiness cannot be neutralised by a
negative event, or even a series of them. Realising this meant that suddenly
the things that used to cause me a huge amount of stress, didn't really matter anymore. Landing up in the
emergency room with a banged up shoulder after falling off a step became much
less of an issue when I could focus on the gorgeous sunset I saw. Smashing a
glass bottle of parsley on my kitchen floor wasn't great but it didn't detract from the
happiness I felt from the song playing in my head when I woke up.
You can
hold on to happiness. Somewhere in my life I must
have stumbled on some sort of motivational poster telling me that the more you
try to hold on to happiness, the more it will elude you. In my mind, happiness
was fleeting. However, the fact that I had to consciously record the happy
events in my day meant that I spent most of the day with them tumbling around
my subconscious or recounting them. This alone made me considerably happier.
Happiness
is surprising. I didn't limit myself to writing down new things every day, but there was
still surprisingly little repetition in my lists. In some cases, there was a
novelty element: the shadow my orchids cast on the wall when I was opening my
curtains in the morning made my heart sing for all of two days. Sometimes I was
just more aware of certain things than others. I'm a creature of habit. I make myself the same breakfast every
morning, but it was only a handful of times that my breakfast made me happy even though I'm fairly sure I do a good job of it every
day. Being surprised by happiness on a daily basis has itself been a wonderful
experience.
You can
make your own. The happiness project taught me how
simple it can be to make my own life significantly happier. I used to think
that I hated being cold, but three weeks into the project I realised how happy
having warm hands made me. Being in
the depths of winter in a country that admittedly has a mild winter but where
indoor heating is not at all common meant that I was often in rooms for
extended periods of time where the temperature was 10-15 degrees. The solution
was to carry gloves in my handbag. Having warm hands continued to make me happy
even though it was a conscious effort on my part.
Happiness
is to be continued. I found the whole project so
worthwhile that two weeks after it was meant to end, I'm still doing it. I’m still being
surprised, and yes, still happy.
Other Guest Posts by Meg
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