What makes you happy?

We all want to be happy, to have a reason to smile and forget our worries for a while. Lately this has been hard to achieve with the stress of restrictions on our lives. Life has become about limits on choices from curfews to work availability and income, spending time with friends and family, health and privacy, and plain old fun. As a result happiness is in short supply.
With a shortage of happiness comes the prevailing question about what makes us happy?
Your happy, their happy, and my happy could be very different things, even so each has the same value and importance to our ability to navigate the world and our experience of it.
Finding happiness in a world that’s filled with a pervasive foreboding of uncertainty such as it is now worldwide is a challenge that none of us have faced before.
So where does happiness fit in amongst the isolation that our closed off lives are overwhelmed by?
For myself this question has been circling about in my mind a lot over the past 18 months.
Walking in the park I see more fear than smiling faces, which unfortunately has become common, at the supermarket I see some relief in the faces of people shopping alone as they pass me in the aisle and smile. It’s the connection with others that stands out as the reason to smile.
These moments shared with others though are not a reliable source for being happy in a closed off world where separation is touted as the primary element for socialising. Intuition tells us to connect, to reach out and be with one another because people are living beings that thrive on interaction. With the natural order of things turned upside down and fear in the spotlight our emotional lives are having their foundations tested. The state of the world has caused happiness to become elusive.
How then do we get some happy?
The conclusion that I’ve reached comes with sayings I’ve heard that resonate with me.
Happiness is not a destination.
As within so without.
Above as below.
These words have helped me to take up a new approach to my own happiness. I have come closer to understanding that happiness is not a place that I can plan to visit, a goal that I can accomplish, and not something that I can find somewhere. When we experience happiness it’s because we feel happy, it comes from inside of us. Happiness is an experience.
None of this means that it is easier to find happiness, but in a world where control of our own lives is methodically and consistently being stripped away with mandates and ongoing rule changing, accessing our own happiness is one thing that we can make choices about.
So what makes you happy? More importantly what can you do about your own happiness?
For me, I like music, walking in the fresh air and watching the birds fly free above me. Patting a dog makes me smile, quirky people make me feel good about the world, and dancing in the kitchen while cooking gives me a sense of happiness deep down inside.
I’m harvesting my own happiness to share with a relaxed look of knowing and a smile where I can, and with those who can see past the constructs of fear to experience happiness.