Happier Without It

I think sometimes it takes getting what you thought you wanted to realize you were happy without it.

That might be the only half-way profound thing to come out of this entry. That came to me earlier in the day today, and ever since I spit it out, I have had a hard time not thinking about it and realizing just how true I think it is.

It’s funny how happiness can be disguised; disguised in a manner that keeps us from completely identifying it. Sure, maybe we don’t feel unhappy, but we don’t find our self thinking to our self how happy we might actually be in our situation. I think it might be just as much that we have become too accustom to the state of feeling satisfied and happy that we begin to not even recognize it when it’s lurking.

One might say we begin to take the feeling of being happy for granted. While I believe that could be possible at some points in time, I feel that the feeling I am depicting here is different. I believe it is less that we are forgetting how happy we were, but more that we don’t realize we are as happy as we are. It’s almost like we don’t realize that what we have is satisfying us to the point of happiness.

I feel that it happens too often in a materialistic world that we find ourselves wanting when really what we think we want isn’t much more than something we have been deceived into believing we need. We convince our self that since it brought “happiness” to someone else that it can (and will) do the same for us. We seem to be on an endless journey to obtain a never-ending state of happiness—a figment of our imagination. We become mislead by thinking that this state can only be achieved through gaining that “next thing” we have convinced our self that we “need.” The irony falls in that in the grand scheme, it is quite possible that we are happy during the time we are striving for the next best thing and that we are simply reluctant to notice it.

What is unfortunate is how often times when we do gain whatever it was that we desired, in the end we end up going without recognizing the minimal change in happiness that it brought us. What typically happens is we simply move on toward wanting whatever it is we now feel will bring us closer to that desired state of happiness without seeing the state of happiness we are already in.

I think what can bring about such a bittersweet discovery is when we have obtained that in which we were desiring and we are capable of realizing that it did not bring us the happiness we had envisioned it bringing us. I believe it is at this point when we can truly see that we were just as happy without it as we were with it that we get the closest to realizing just how happy we actually are in life.