I have the impression that some people are looking for happiness throughout their lives, in some cases maybe never reaching a feeling of being truly happy. They are painting a rosy picture of what it will take for them to be happy (possibly including the perfect spouse, beautiful children, (insert personal dream), etc.). I think this quest has something to do with perfectionism overall - always striving for something better. This means that in the search for happiness they prevent themselves from feeling happy. Ironic, huh...
For me, happiness is the ability to realise that everything is good, even when it might not exactly be true. But letting myself believe and feel that it is. Tonight I was happy. Everything inside me was at peace, I felt absolutely and truly satisfied with where I was right there and then. Breaking this down, happiness is about appreciating what you have in a certain moment, being able to shut any disturbances out.
Happiness is elusive, though. As soon as you start analysing it, the feeling will be gone. (Like the atom model: you cannot know both where the atom is and what its speed is, for those of you who are into that kind of analogies... ;)) The moment is fragile - you can only appreciate it when you have it, 'cause when you start thinking about why you are happy you will break the focus, and you cannot feel happy and analyse the feeling at the same time. Why not? Because happiness is a bit of perfection in a vacuum of time and space, and perfection cannot exist outside the vacuum moment. This also means that there can't be various degrees of happiness (since perfect is, well, perfect). Further, this means that the way you can measure happiness (if in some case you would like to talk about quantification) is by counting how often you feel happy, and not how happy you feel. Anyway...
Am I deceiving myself into feeling happy? Disregarding the negative (or just non-optimal) things around me? Hmm... Yes. And I treasure the ability to be able to do that. :)
Happiness is a state of mind. I believe in that now more than ever - despite the fact that I have had this text hanging on my wall for 8 years.
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