Very often in conversations I have with friends and family, the subject of happiness always comes up. There are countless books on happiness, there’s a movie with the title of today’s posting, there is a class at Stanford University on this subject also given to students enrolled in business classes, so I have to deduct that happiness is a very important matter in the role of being a humanoid. My self-appointed title is what else, happy contessa. So, yes, happiness is very important to me and I guess to the rest of the world.
How do we define happiness? I am sure it has different meanings for each one of us. For me, happiness is a thing of the moment. Happy thoughts, happy moments. It has time limits also. Happiness in the morning is not the same as happiness at noon, afternoon or night-time. Good coffee, having the newspaper delivered closer to my door and not on the street, being able to breathe, to have a bathroom to go to, and opening my kitchen curtains and being exposed to my foliage is just divine. It makes me feel as if I am part of something bigger than me and my tiny universe. Having a moment of gratitude makes me extremely happy.
Happiness is having a lot of books around me, peace and quiet when the moment demands it, or better put, when I feel I want to be quiet. It is knowing my daughters and son and their families are doing just fine, and so it is knowing the rest of the clan are managing without too much drama. Do not like drama!! Even though, I have been known to have been a drama queen sometime some moons ago. I didn’t know better, and loved to waste precious energy dramatizing and making grandiose every miniscule problem.
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
That’s when learning that life is guaranteed with problems, paying taxes and dying came into my life to settle things down, and show me what the real priorities in life are. First, being able to breathe, and then the rest is very thick gravy.
Most of the time, happiness is determined by staying in the moment. Then things don’t seem to be that grand spectacle of crapola. A 100% happiness will get to be tiresome, I think. Utopia is eight feet below surface and they don’t seem to be doing too much noise, so I gather excitement is not one quality of the population of down below. I am going to be cremated, so I’ll be happily joining the sharks, pretty fish and corals. Now, that’s what I call not knowing what tomorrow brings. One day in the Pacific, another in the Atlantic, and hopefully a lot of time in the Caribbean Sea. I’ll be the best sun tanned sand you will ever see.
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
Let focus on the happiness issue here. To be totally honest, sometimes I don’t even know what really makes me happy. I sometimes equate happiness with having an eternal smile on my face. Then the wrinkles issue comes into the picture and I have to stop laughing. Enough lines already. Need to invent some kind of eraser. Saw one on one of the shopping channels, but then the product goes away after you clean your face. Scary. Now you see me looking old and full of wrinkles, now you don’t. Will confuse the heck out of people who know me already and those yet to know. I’ll keep my wrinkles in the meantime. Less complicated.
To prove a point I made all those little happy faces. I am tired of looking at them. Even happiness has a limit. Too much is just too much. Enough is enough. No more happy faces for the rest of this posting.
Going back to happiness, you decide what makes you happy. And then, as they used to sing, “don’t worry, be happy.” Hippies and Bob Marley, I think, always had it right all the time.
So it was today…4th of May, 2011…a day in the pursuit of happiness…
Your happy Contessa
P.S. I just realized, the mention of money never came into my mind when I was thinking about what happiness is for me. That’s fascinating.
Noury's Creative World... 
A watched never boils as my Mother would say.
I am certainly sure your mom was a very wise woman. But I need further interpretation here to get what she meant. Hope you are doing very well in your journey and continue to have happiness. Thanks for reading on the road.