Is anyone really happy? What does genuine happiness even look like? It gets hard to tell in a world full of standards and ideals, full of people constantly trying to one-up one another or get the next best thing.
One of the most seemingly simple yet surprisingly challenging realizations that I’ve made recently is that it’s okay to let myself be happy. You might think that’s a given. Of course, it’s what we all want – we all want to be happy, we all want to feel good. That’s the end goal, right?
We’re always chasing this idea of happiness, yet we’re never actually happy. We’re constantly searching for it, but what we do when we find it? We don’t know how to deal with it because there’s this idea implanted in our heads that there always has to be something more. It feels so hard to just stop and settle and enjoy the moment sometimes.
Being Vulnerable to Life
For me, there’s always been this part of me that’s afraid, afraid of things being too good. I’m afraid of things being too right, because that means there’s a chance of something messing it all up. That means there’s a million opportunities for things to go wrong. It’s unpredictable. When things are difficult, we assume they can’t get much worse, but when things are going right, we start to lose our sense of control over that situation. When things are good, we know there is something to lose, and that leaves us feeling exposed.
That’s why all the best things in life seem to also be the hardest. All of the things that bring us the most joy also bring us the most pain. It’s like falling in love – the most amazing yet absolutely terrifying thing in the world. We’re letting go of our fear, we’re opening ourselves up to another person completely and sharing ourselves in every way. In this moment, we knowingly become vulnerable to the potential for pain but we accept it because the happiness this brings us overpowers that. The potential of getting hurt is better than not having the chance for happiness at all.
When we learn to let go of that weight, that fear, that pain, that continues to hold us back, we open ourselves up to possibility. We let our guard down, allow ourselves to get comfortable, surrender to the moment and the endless opportunities available to us.
Before we can do that, we need to accept where we are. We need to start to feel comfortable in being exactly who we are, and we need to learn to love that person. In order to let ourselves be happy, we have to realize that we deserve to be happy.
Stop Reaching, Stop Searching…
It’s not always the easiest thing. We continually beat ourselves up, and we find ways to criticize ourselves. So many of us don’t know what it feels like to really love ourselves because we’ve gotten stuck in our patterns of self-criticism for so long. I know for me it’s a continual process. I have to remind myself a lot.
There’s this sense of pressure in society, to fit into a mold, to be a certain way. We’ve been ingrained with these ideas that material things will bring us happiness. We’ve been taught that having money, a house, a fancy car, a “good” job – these things will bring us happiness. Then why are so many of us unhappy? These ideals society is setting for us don’t seem to be working. We’re always wanting more.
We’ve been taught that we’re supposed to do things a certain way because that’s how life works.
We constantly get asked what we do, where we went to school, whether we’re married. But does anyone ask us who we are, or whether we’re happy? It’s not a competition, and happiness never comes from trying to prove ourselves better than someone else or reaching for something more.
We’ll never truly be able to find happiness if we don’t love the person we are. We need to learn how to not only love ourselves, but how to take care of ourselves. We need to understand the things that we need, and recognize that they may be entirely different from what those around us need. We need to allow ourselves to open our hearts, to be vulnerable, to show the world who we are, without fear. We need to learn how to fully be in that moment, wherever it may be, despite the fear or uncertainty it may bring.
Embracing Exactly Where You Are
Whatever we are doing right now, wherever we are in our lives, we need to own it. Struggles, difficulties, roadblocks – they are going to keep occurring again and again. Things are going to keep happening, things are going to keep trying to mess with our success. Life is going to keep presenting us with challenges. We need to be resilient. We need to continue making that conscious effort to be the person we need to be in spite of all the challenges.
We need to stop looking elsewhere. We need to stop looking for something more, something different, something better. We’re never going to find it if we don’t first look within ourselves and find the root cause.
If we can really do that, if we can accept the person we are and love that person and the choices we are making in our lives right now, if we can enjoy our life amidst the mess and the imperfections and let go of all that fear that we’ve been holding on to, we can truly be happy.
Making Mindful 