How To Be Happy: The Next Chapter

Though it’s easy to scoff at the horribly cliché title of this blog post, I’m hoping that if my life were in book form, the next few months would prove to be the ultimate page-turner. As a literature fiend, a truly sickening book metaphor seems to be the easiest way to shout out to the world that I’m moving to Australia. Cue the dramatic ‘duh, duh, duhhhhh’.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post that I chose not to publish. The basic tone of such post was I'm soo bored I hate my life woe is meeeee and nobody’s got time to listen to a measly excuse of a blogger waffling on about her sorrows when our lives are often hard enough to manage on their own. I was down in the dumps, unsatisfied, a grumpy grizzly, if you will. After a hefty few months of wallowing, I decided that my slightly unhinged and flat life needed a re-service. After all, do things really need to be 100% broken to warrant the need to be fixed?

In an attempt to bid farewell to the sulk, I culled everything that no longer made me happy because, let's cut to the chase here, it is completely okay to focus on your own happiness. You are allowed to travel and live where you want, spend your money on nice things or sometimes tell friends you just want a night in. To think about your own happiness doesn’t make you selfish, it encourages you to take control of your emotions. It is futile to push on believing that things will fix themselves if you just sit back and watch life pass by.

The Importance of Being Mindful

So it’s the first day of a fresh new month. The sun is shining more than it’s raining, when we finish work at 5.30pm it’s still light outside and we are one month closer to summer. One might say we have quite a lot to be happy about. However, the reality is that no matter how bloody beautiful it is outside or how swimmingly well our lives are going, the twenty-first century human being has a habit of either dwelling on the past, or worrying about the future. The present ‘now’ doesn’t become a sincerely meaningful thing until tomorrow comes and it’s transformed into the past.

As humans, we are very very bad at appreciating the present moment. Actually, not even appreciating it but merely living it. Everything boils down to yesterday or tomorrow. But what about right now? Like, right this second? How are you feeling? The past has been and gone and you’re never going to create a time-machine, so really, the most important moments of our lives are the ones that we’re drifting straight through whilst our busy minds are set to autopilot.

Valentine's Day; When Only Appearances Matter

Yep, it's that time of year, the 'Hallmark Holiday' created to tell everyone that if you're single, you're a real fucking loner, and if you're in a relationship, you should probably buy some flowers and a card because otherwise you're clearly not loved up enough.

There are three options for Valentine's Day;

1. Take your other half out for dinner in a crowded, contrived restaurant where all couples are competing for the cutest couple 2k15 award.
2. Stay in with your partner where convention dictates you must set the mood. You light those candles and lay those rose petals, cupid. 
3. Or as a singleton, you have two options - stay in and feel really fucking miserable while you perceive everyone else having the loveliest time OR like me, dress up, go out with your pals and get pissed as a fart (I can't wait). 

The thing that all three of these options have in common though is that it's the appearance of everyone else around you and your knowledge of what everyone else is doing that matters. You think, oh but he's taking her here and we're sat at home. Or, I'm sat here all alone while everyone else in a relationship is getting laid and spoilt rotten. When in reality, you have absolutely no idea what is going on beneath that adorably happy relationship on the table opposite you. You have absolutely no idea the struggles anyone else is experiencing and by comparison of their appearance, you deconstruct everything that you're doing wrong in life. 

Don't let appearances trick you; if you are happy not really doing anything with your loved one to celebrate Valentine's day or if you are happy being alone, then good for you. Appearances which lead to a comparison to your own life are dangerous.

Essentially, shut everyone else out on Valentine's and appreciate what you have that makes you happy. By all means tell friends, family, partners and the family dog that you love them, but know that today is not the only day to do it. Christmas might be Santa's busiest day of the year, but come Valentine's Day, Cupid can go elsewhere because there's absolutely nothing for him to do here. 

How to tell the January blues to do one.

So we all know the 'new year new me' hype is utter bullshit - you're still the same person you were last month, maybe just slightly porkier and with a bag full of regrets from your crazy drunkenness on New Years Eve'.

However, even if January is the shittest month known to man - we're on a comedown from the festive period, we're skint, it's raining (cry me a river) - I realised as I was walking along minding my own business that I had absolutely no reason to feel crap. I might not have any exotic holidays planned or that Burberry trench coat that I am so badly yearning for, but what I do have is just fine. That's where the difference between happiness and contentment comes in. 

Every time we're not truly happy with every single aspect of our lives, we mistake it for unhappiness. We achieve everything we've ever wanted, we obtain all material goods to satisfy, and yet our happiness lasts for about a week before we strive for the next big thing and we're not truly settled until we get it. 

I'm not being a moron, insinuating that people aren't ever unhappy, I'm simply iterating that being content with what you do have should be that which makes you smile, because sometimes, true happiness 100% of the time just isn't possible.

CONTENTMENT  Having one’s desire bound by what one has (though that may be less than one could have wished); not disturbed by the desire of anything more, or of anything different; satisfied so as not to repine.

Restless and discontent, we always have that one thing we desire and strive for. Ambition is everything, striving for material goods or temporary highs to make you happy is not. Of course, nobody should have to settle, and though the dichotomy between happiness and unhappiness is vast, it should never be either/or.  Contentment is the medium that I am quite satisfied to place myself in. Unfortunately it would be naive to expect everybody to be happy every single second of every waking day. Contentment is realising that although you might not have much to look forward to this month and you might not have the money you strive for and that one person you're after, you're content with the things you do have.

It is the long term solution that everyone needs to be reminded of once in a while; the mother, the life long friendship that you couldn't live without. Happiness is the short term burst of energy and euphoria and that which is not constant; the drunken night out or that amazing Dominoes pizza. Sure, strive for constant happiness, please do. But know that if you meditate hard on the conditions that you couldn't live without, you will find contentment right in front of you.