True Happiness...

I just Googled the word 'happiness' and came up with bunches of different ideas about what happiness is. It's definitions, how to get it, what to do with it, where to put it. It's a state of mind, it's even a movie from 1998. Wow.

It seems that quite a few people are really concerned with the topic of Happiness and how to find it in our lives. I found a 'happiness workbook' so you can jot down ideas and work on exercises to help you define it for yourself. There is even a lady who is writing a book about happiness, she is trying to put all the techniques that she had heard of into practice. She is giving herself a year to find out if they work or not. I wonder how close she is to reaching her goal. What is going to happen to her if she doesn't find happiness using the time tested principles that she has found? That could be really bad for humanity.

What about our own personal pursuit of happiness? We are guaranteed the right to pursue it by the US Constitution. That is our birthright, one of the main benefits of being born an American, I would think. We can legally do whatever it is that we feel we need to in order to find it. Which is pretty cool, to my way of thinking. As long as we don't tread on other people's rights to pursue it, that is. Once we start that then the entire process starts to get messed up big time; we can't go after our own happiness while trampling someone else's. So, we need to keep that in mind before we go crazy looking for happiness.

About once a month or so my husband asks me if I'm happy 'yet'. This question makes me weary, like happiness is a destination that I should have arrived at long ago. Yes, I suffered from a nasty bout of depression a few years back. I was really low, and wondered if I could feel better ever again. Not being on this Earth looked like a really great idea at the time- that is how badly I felt. But, I did indulge in a bit of chemical therapy, and over the course of two years I did emerge from that dark hole. And I do feel much better about life in general.

But, it wasn't a direct lack of 'happiness' in my life that sent me into that depression. Not at all- back then I had everything that any person would want: A beautiful and vibrant family, a wonderful home that is so much more than what 99% of the rest of the planets' inhabitants get to live in. I had good health, and I had intelligence. All of the makings of 'happiness' I would guess. So, what in the hell was MY problem? I had it easy, happiness should have gone hand in hand with my life. I was proof that happiness and depression could not coexist together.

The term 'happiness' never entered into that picture. It wasn't that I was or wasn't lacking in that department, my problem with depression was about so much more than not being able to grasp and hold on to mere fleeting happiness. And, with all of this talk of defining what happiness is, I'm still not sure what it takes to have it. Maybe I have it already and don't know it? You hear people talk all of the time about a certain time in their lives and how it was 'the happiest' time for them. Did they know it when they were experiencing it? Or is happiness something that we realize we have experienced AFTER the fact? Is happiness really that fleeting that we are unable to recognize it when we are living it? Perhaps we humans have too many expectations about happiness and it's real importance in life- happiness is one of those concepts that is seemingly larger than life itself.

Whatever you may adopt as your definition of happiness, one thing is for sure; it IS out there, somewhere. How do I know this? Because we can't have sadness without some sort of opposite, which in this case is happiness. It may be in the laughter of a child, it may be in the color of your favorite flower. Or it could just be one of those undefinable things that we keep pursuing while we are busy living our regular lives. Hopefully for all of us we won't need to look back at our past to discover that we have had it in our present, and hopefully our present will continue to contribute to a happy future. I'll let you know.