WHAT BRINGS YOU HAPPINESS ?

If I tell you to define happiness, how would you describe it? Some of you will name a person, place, time or something like that, but what is happiness exactly? It is a feeling, emotion, a sense of peace, a sense of satisfaction or all in one? If being at peace is what brings you happiness, then what brings you peace?

Do you know, people are able to attract pleasure more out of ordinary things as they age. The younger people described their happiness more with extraordinary things. So, I guess we have established the fact that happiness might be different for everybody. While we are stating facts, Harvard business school study found that we tend to spend more money on others than on ourselves when we are happy. So, who’s planning a party, eh?

Subjective well being is dependent on current situations. Your overall sense of well being cannot be defined by how happy you are today or last Sunday. It might differ from time to time. If I ask you to rate your happiness on a scale of 1-10 at a particular point of time when you might be feeling tired, you might say 4, but I ask you to rate it considering overall aspects of your life, you might be able to say 8 or 9 or whatever number suits you.

You know, when we are close to someone, family or friends or might be a partner or even a relation that has “no name”. We tend to get influenced by their actions to some extent at least. In my case, I tend to get really anxious when something goes wrong in my relationship with anyone, someone getting mad at me for instance. I’d go out of my way to keep things intact or make things better. What I really mean here is that we put our comfort, our happiness not within ourselves but in other people and places. We forget to keep our happiness within ourselves. It’s ours to keep and we usually keep it in someone else’s hands. That is where the problem begins. We keep our valuable things safe, we keep it with ourselves, don’t we? Isn’t your own happiness valuable too?

Would you rather be peaceful or be happy? Or both? Does happiness include being peaceful as well? Or is being satisfied is what brings you happiness? Well, that could be something to think about. Life might be a constant series of disappointments, that leads to unhappiness. We have got to remember that we have to keep our happiness within ourselves as well. Its your life to live, and sometimes, you have got to take control of your feelings and try thinking about yourself instead of others for a change.