Searching for Happiness
In high school, I was happy with the getting high, listening to music, and hanging on the corner. “Lookin’ for the heart of Saturday night,” as Tom Waits so poignantly wrote in his song. Someone once told me “Authentic happiness comes from identifying and cultivating your most fundamental strengths and using them every day in work, love, play, and parenting.” My strengths? At eighteen that was functioning while high. Many of my strengths, were filtered through lenses other people. Rather, those strengths had been projected onto me by my parents, teachers, and a culture that molds us. I needed to learn how to draw my own happiness map, and follow it. Here’s what I learned. I needed to learn how to draw my own happiness map, and follow it. Here’s what I learned.
After sixty years I’ve decided to try and find it, happiness that is. Here’s what I did:
First, You’ve got to know something about who you are, and what lights you up. I thought i did.Till I too this profile test, from the University of Pennsylvania’s happiness questionnaire and Strengths Finder.
Be mindful to remember who you once you are happy about your life, thing will change, and what lights you up. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you’re reaching for your stars. There’s a lot of magic and plenty of miracles every day, if we only remember to look for them. Stop dwelling on the negative. Developing a simple mindful practice helps set the compass point of your personal happiness map in the direction of what matters to you.
Like everything in life. You have to work for it. If you truly want happiness, nothing will stop you from finding it. But sometime our happiness my find us without certain people in our lives. Simply because they are the cause of our unhappiness. Other times it may bring those we love closer.
While finding our strength will help with our so called work life. Doing something we enjoy for a living will definitely reduce life stress. But, will do little if once we leave work we retreat to a hermit lifestyle because we are ashamed of who we are, when being able to be who you are, is what will complete your happiness. Aristotle came to the conclusion that happiness is what human actions should ultimately strive for. Wake up and live, just as your sadness affect those in you life. Think how you happiness will effect them?