What does happiness mean to you? How does it affect you and what brings you happiness?
For me happiness is the wonderful realisation of your own luck in the midst of everyday life. Those moments of joy you feel, when your heart skips a beat and you feel at peace with yourself, the world and you just want to remain in that state forever. It’s the warm summer rain, a night in front of the fireplace when it’s stormy and cold outside, it’s the sound of hooves on the forrest ground, the moments of pure friendship and love or even good music or a good book. There is always magic and happiness in the small things. It makes me smile to see random acts of kindness, for instance a young guy helping an elderly lady with a walking frame get off the tram or just a smile on a stranger’s face.
But could happiness exist without pain, sadness, boredom or just the blandness of day to day life? Would it affect us in the same way? And how is it that some people simply cannot show their happiness or even experience happiness?
I know that I experience feelings more deeply than the average person due to being highly sensitive. That means I feel pain and heartbreak to the extreme but I also seem to hold a higher capacity for happiness and love. I’m the kind of person who is greatly affected by music and will have goosebumps and start crying if it touches me or collect strength from it when it builds me up. I will sometimes express my emotions such as gratitude in a way that might seem over the top to some but it just reflects what I feel. And I actually enjoy being honest about how I feel. I have some friends who are similar in that way and can get as excited as I get about some things. And to be quite honest I find it difficult to deal with people who cannot express their emotions freely. Be it because they simply have none or because they have been taught to suppress them. And yet there is no right or wrong to feeling and happiness is something we all deserve.
But how do you go about chasing happiness? Due to my somewhat gloomy disposition during wintertime I have been focusing on finding out exactly what makes me happy and have been trying to make time to indulge in my let’s call them “passions”. So instead of moping around and complaining I decided to dedicate my next posts to the top ten things that make me happy and keep me going…
Voices from the Attic 