Is happiness a stroke of luck?
Have you ever asked yourself, what is the meaning of happiness? How does one become happy? Do we have to be blessed to have a happy life, to have great kids and be surrounded by love and laughter?
It sometimes may seem that way. We look around and see a family or a person that seems to have the perfect life. Some people may think this exact thing when they look at me and my girls. Who can blame them? Just look at our typical weekend; we are in Borneo in one and Bali the next. We're always laughing and goofing around... we're always happy.
But little do they know that my life was very different three short years ago.
In 2006 my husband and I separated. I sunk into a deep depression, to put it mildly. There were days when I couldn't even pull myself out of bed. I cried so much that my eyes swelled shut - my own brother was going to jab me with an epi-pen, thinking that I was having an allergic reaction to something! My hair could have been on fire and I still wouldn’t have been able to get out of bed to find water!
My whole life I had a plan of what my life was going to be, and it surely wasn’t living with my brother and his wife, going for a week straight without seeing my girls (I’m an advocate for dad’s rights, but split custody can totally suck!), trying to build a business from the ground up and figuring out how to cook something edible (still totally lost there).
Six months after the separation I looked like a cross between Skelator and that crazy lady in NYC that walks around mumbling to herself....
One day, my friend took a look at me and told me something worth printing out and putting in a frame,
Another brilliant friend of mine recently told me something similar that really resonated. He said, "The human heart is the most selfish organ, it takes the purest most oxygenated blood for itself first before it distributes it out to the rest of the body. But if it wasn't selfish this way, then the rest of your body would deteriorate and fall apart.”
What he is trying to say is that the heart must be healthy for the rest of your body to survive - period. And I think this applies to happiness as well.
My life is now so drastically different from the life of pain and sadness that I went through three years ago, and it is all but because of two simple things:
- I made a decision every morning to wake up and work towards my own happiness
- I took care of myself, I gave all the energy I had to healing myself so that I could be happy and take care of my girls (because crazy lady Skeletor was not cutting it as a mom!)
I usually highlight parenting “experts” on this blog, but today I thought I would share my thoughts on Happiness with all of you.
The greatest gift that I can give my girls are the memories of our time together. It doesn’t matter if we are traveling the world or relaxing at home on rainy night, I want them to remember our happiness and laughter above everything else.
Before the stress of adult life sets in, I want to give them a foundation of Happiness. I want them to have a secret recipe for joy that they can whip up like boston creme pie anytime they hunger for something sweet in their life.
We all have to participate in our own happiness - and as if that's not hard enough - we have to maintain it once we achieve it! My girls are allowed to experience any emotion that comes to them, but they also know that they are in control of their own thoughts and feelings.
Remember, we choose our thoughts, our thoughts then become our reality which sets in motion the cycle of happiness.
So to misquote Jimmy Soul; if you wanna be happy for the rest of your life, go for my personal point of view and pick happy thoughts!
He who can think the happiest thoughts wins the happiness game!
Lastly, the biggest breakthrough I had was simply this; I realized that I needed to start seeing a person for all the greatness of who they are now and not the picture of them I had created in my head, or all of the things I wish they were or want them to be.
I used to relate to people - even my daughters - as I wanted to see them, not as who they really are. I told myself a story about who my kids were, how they should be and how they should act, and then got upset when they didn't turn out to match the very detailed and intricate story that I created about them!
Now I let my girls show me who they are, tell me what they want to be. It is their simple authenticity and joy which makes me happier than anything else. (Yes, even happier than that dream where Maddy found the cure for cancer the same day Sydney was featured on the cover of Time Magazine for negotiating world peace and I was riding around in one of those flying cars that drives itself
So here’s to Happiness - may you all swim in it daily and pass it on like the most treasured of family heirloom!
Yes - one must take responsibility for one's own life... Nobody can "provide" you with happiness. Sure people may make you happy for short periods of time, but in the end it is only you who can assure your future happiness and joy. Kids provide pleasure but only if you take the action to share in their lives...
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