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.

Sharing Your Joy and Happiness

Do you let people around you know what makes you happy? Do people know how much you appreciate different aspects in your life?

Today at work I took some time to make a call to a friend of my coworker who passed away nearly three months ago. This friend of her's had unfortunately just found out about her passing this week because he had limited contact with my coworker. Anyways, after I had broke the news to him and several of her other friends in Houston who hadn't heard the news, this friend in particular asked for me to call him, so I did today.

As I talked to him he shared with me about how my friend/coworker had always told him how much she greatly LOVED her job with us. She would tell him how she just LOVED the people she worked with and how she was so happy working with us. [Note: Apparently she had told this to more than just him, as another of her friends from Houston had told me the same thing...how she spoke so highly of our place of employment and our staff].

So as we were talking, I discovered that it had been him who was one of the many calls I have taken over the past few months of people calling our office and asking to speak with our now gone friend/coworker. Typically when I receive these calls I say, "_______ is no longer with us." It is typically taken as "she no longer works here," which is true, but it also has a stronger meaning. Anyways...

This friend of her's that I was on the phone with mentioned how he had called once trying to reach her and I had told him that and he of course said, "Oh okay." and hung up. Well today on the phone he was telling me how that day when he hung-up he immediately knew something wasn't right about that. He explained it as, he just KNEW that couldn't be everything because she loved her job so dearly that she would never leave and had she had been fired, he just knew she would have contacted him and told him. He continually expressed to me how it was just so weird for him, as he just KNEW something wasn't right when he got that response as he called our office that day.

I don't know. I just thought that was really interesting. I really don't have a witty way to conclude this post (as I originally thought I would have when I decided to write it...HA), but I can say I wonder how many of our friends would know the things we love so dearly and we would know that something just wasn't quite right if we heard our friend was no longer a part of something he/she loved.

I can tell you this, there's really not much of a salary price you can place on a work environment that you get to share with people you love to be around and people you find yourself looking forward to seeing each day. Loving the people you work with is what makes a job GREAT. Apparently my dear coworker let others know how much she loved the workplace she was a part of and the people she got to labor alongside.