Just HOW Happy Are You?

Image by Evil Erin via FlickrA few weeks ago, I heard a statement that caught me off guard because it rang so true. Someone told me that people think happiness is something that you can get when really it is something we already have that is actually magnified by giving it away.

 Happiness seems to be that "thing" all people seem to want in life. We hear, "I just want to be happy....." yet, we seem to give  the word, "happy" more connotations than stars in the sky. We are happy when we make the grade or is that just satisfaction? We are happy when someone pays us a compliment or is that just gratitude? We are happy when someone tells us they want to marry us(usually!) or is that just love? We are happy the test results are nothing to worry about, but that might really be relief. We are happy our team won the game, the car didn't die, the dinner did not burn, the baby finally went to sleep and the scale says what we hoped it would. We use the word happy for a variety of emotions.



Happy is many things in many different ways at many different times.We just know that like true unconditional love, happy is something we want to have. But it is often true that we don't know what we are unhappy about until something happens that make us realize our "happy" has been threatened either by a circumstance or event or maybe even  by a person.We take our happiness for granted.


 Often we  work to reach goals  we assume will make us more happy and content only to realize now we have a whole new set of goals to reach because we are at a new place and want different resources. We imagine we will be happy if we find our dream job, Mr. or Ms. Right, or our perfect house. We even comment that "things will be better" once we  graduate or get married or relocate or get that new car or even pay off all of our debts. The truth is that for a little while we might be more content, but we will constantly be tempted with the next best thing and once again our contentment is rocked by something that we didn't even know we wanted until we realized we didn't have it.We measure our happiness by what we need to get rather than what we already have.

The University of Pennsylvania's Authentic Happiness Project offers various scales and measurements about Life Satisfaction, Gratitude Surveys,Meaning in Life evaluations as well as Happiness research. You can take some of the surveys on line and find out just how happy or unhappy you are. But I think happiness is really a hunger than needs to be fed regularly. We want to feel contented enough not to have that hunger although there is no doubt that it will surface and we will need to feed it again. Sometimes it is fed through good news, compliments, relationships and even things but it is never completely satisfied by getting something we want or even need. The longevity of happiness seems to be mostly dependent on what we do with it when we have it. Do we share it with someone who needs a little more "happy" in  his or her own life? Do we make the most of our happiness by investing the blessings we do have to draw upon them in times when our own "happiness" seems diminished? Do we measure our happiness by our own rulers and not someone else's yardstick?


Just for this week, count how many times you say the word happy whether it is "I am happy you made it home before the weather turned nasty." or " I'm so happy I found my car keys." and every time you do put some type of token in a jar to remind you of your "happy". At the end of the week, invest your some of your "happy" in adding to someone else's,  because the only way to multiply your happiness is to divide it. And before you ask yourself, just how happy you are, think about all the things that would've removed some of your happiness that did not happen in your life and then ask yourself again and I am sure, you will realize that "happy" is many things and sometimes it is in not getting the things that could have happened, the events that might have been, the circumstances that almost were...happiness is like my friend put it..."when you think God has sent a curse and then realize He only sends blessings and you get a chance to experience it that way."
Image by Roo Reynolds via Flickr
Remember the song, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands."? What REALLY makes you happy? My applause is deafening. How about Yours?