For years, I always caught myself thinking, “I’ll never be 100% happy.”
And genuinely, I believe that. It sounds sad but I never saw anything wrong with the statement.
I would say, “There’s always something that could go wrong.” I could be happy one minute and a mess the next. That’s life.
There’s the saying, “You deserve to be happy.” And yeah, sure. We all deserve to feel happy.
But it’s literally impossible to be happy all the time; and I didn’t know how to say that without sounding depressing until now.
Someone once told me, “Just be happy.” Because apparently that’s just what I deserve and I just have to be that all the time, no matter what.
I recently read this book called, “The Year Of No Nonsense.” By Meredith Atwood. It’s a great book, 10/10, about basically getting over yourself and moving the hell on with your life.
This book taught me a lot and gave me better insight on a variety of things, but one thing that really stuck with me was her view on happiness.
She defined happiness as a temporary buzz or experience. A visitor.
This implying that it comes and goes; it’s not permanent. Just like every other emotion, (sadness, anger, excitement), it’s not permanent. You can feel all these emotions in a day, or even a few minutes.
Being happy, and feeling true happiness, is an emotion and emotions change. So the probability of someone always being happy is little to none.
While we think the goal is to be happy, the goal is really to be at peace. With peace comes comfort and contentment (which is like happiness’ cousin). It’s also acceptance that things aren’t always sunshine and rainbows.
In a way, knowing that happiness is temporary, makes you appreciate those happy moments a lot more. It allows us to be more present; to not be worried about how long it will last. So that if it does go away for a little, being replaced by another emotion, it’s not burdening us.
Meredith writes, “Peace is something we have, we can internalize peace, hold onto and turn to it. Peace is about simply being and being okay just being.”
Like for example, if something really pisses me off, I’m not happy. But hey, it happened, it’s done, it sucked, but it’s done. And I’m okay with that. I’m at peace with it.
It didn’t destroy me, and in the end, I’m okay.
The main thing peace means to me is just being okay.
Being 100% happy all the time equals a perfect life, and I don’t know everything, but I know nobody has a perfect life.
Striving to be happy all the time sets unrealistic standards, followed shortly after by disappointment and immense pressure to be, as I said, perfect.
Happiness= Emotion. Temporary= Changes.
Your goal in life shouldn’t be to be happy. That sounds funky, but truthfully, happiness really is a temporary buzz. However, happiness can be found in a number of things, and it should be cherished and enjoyed for that moment.
Peace is longer-lasting, and can potentially be a permanent state; at least more permanent than happiness.
The goal is peace. The goal is to be okay.
