We search for happiness each day, the elusive concept that takes a lifetime of exploring. We often think happiness comes through winning the lottery, through getting a big break, buying a house, a car, the latest fashionable item. But those provide only sporadic feelings of excitement. When the effects wear off, we are back to feeling gloomy, negative, downhearted or depressed. This is because happiness as a goal is not something we strive towards. It's not a tangible thing we can feel, nor is it something which comes to us when we work at it. That is why some of the poorest people are very happy because it is an indefinable quality we either have or we don't.
Happiness is a state of being. It is how we feel deep inside of us at any moment in time, not next year or tomorrow, but now, and each day after that. It does not depend on anything at all except the feeling about ourself to make us happy. Material things merely enhance it for a moment, but we give happiness life through 5 crucial things:
1. The love we feel for ourself.
2. The love we share with others
3. The gratitude we have for living and life itself.
4. The contentment we feel in our abilities and achievement.
5. The self-belief we have that we can make things happen.
In a recent book, I feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron, the writer, seems to regard the ageing neck with disgust. The gratitude for being alive with her unique neck, when many other people with 'beautiful' necks were very dead, was lost upon her. She still had LIFE. The majority of people in this world are unhappy simply because they do not like themselves. They spend their waking moments wishing they could be someone else, or they could change their nose, face, arms, body or hair. Many people loathe themselves. they hate to pass a mirror to see their reflection, dreading to hear themselves speak or to see themselves in a photo. They yearn for a perfect being to be represented in a perfect image, an unrealistic ideal which makes them feel continually inadequate. This means they can never be happy because two things emerge from their lack of self-love.
No Reinforcement or Affirmation
First, they cease to be appealing to others because no one can likes what they too reject. They might attract some people who have low esteem too, but as neither one is capable of offering positive support to the other, the attraction soon wanes because one person will either take too much or both will simply take from each other without giving anything back. Such a relationship will be short on reinforcement and affirmation and long on regrets and impossible expectations. So there will not be much of a love to share, mainly blame and discontentment. Unable to love themselves, they are unlikely to share love either because they cannot give away what they haven't got.
The second thing which will happen is that there will be little gratitude for anything in their life, or little contentment in themselves and their capabilities, because the focus will always be on what is missing and not what they are blessed with. There will be a constant desire for something else because of the basic dissatisfaction with themselves. Such people can never be satisfied. Everything will be perceived to be 'wrong' or 'not right'. The fact that they have life, limb, and faculties all working will be lost upon those who are unhappy with themselves. Happiness is never possible in such situations because if they cannot appreciate themselves it is difficult to appreciate and value others too.
In fact, when we are unhappy we are likely to put ourself down and readily believe that we are not as good as others; not up to standard and not as clever, etc. Somehow, no matter how beautiful and blessed we are, we lose confidence regarding our potential, so happiness consistently eludes us. Lacking the self-belief to get whatever we want, and to be whomever we wish, we waste our talents in anxiety and frustration, in wishing and yearning and in self deprecation. Often it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, one which is guaranteed to deny us the happiness we seek for a very long time.
Happiness is elusive only if we do not accept each day as given; only if we continue to seek what isn't really there while ignoring what is; only if we expect the worst; if we reject ourself and we take our world and loved ones for granted. Once we have those five qualities of loving, sharing, gratitude, contentment and self-belief, we won't ever have to seek happiness again because it would have settled quite snugly within us.
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