I b e l i e v e that finding happiness is the most universal desire in human beings. What I've learned to be true in my life is something you've heard a million times... that you can choose to be happy. This is really an exhausted statement and I know that, but every time I've heard it, it's been said to me by someone who has a lot more wisdom than I do. I think that the most important change I've seen in myself is how I would have defined happiness a few years ago and how I define it now.
Many people search for happiness in their own brilliant plans and expectations in their heads. This is where I used to think I'd find it, too. I would come up with an idea and fall in love with it. I really used to think that gaining what I wanted was what made me happy. I didn't realize I thought this way until I started to think differently.
I never had an "aha" moment, there was never a climatic experience that changed my way of thinking. I just started to observe and realize something. I used to tell life to take a certain path. "Let me make this part. Let me make this team. Let me be friends with these people. Let me become as good as someone else and then I'll find my joy. Well, life doesn't always listen to me and when things didn't work out, I realized at the end of the day, I just wasn't happy. So I took a step back and I asked myself why.
I realized that I wasn't truly happy on the days that I gained things. Even when dreams of mine have come true, I've never been as ecstatic as I thought I'd be. Rather, it was the day that I expected nothing and was found by everything, the day I chose to forgive someone who wasn't sorry, the day I stopped assuming and realized I was wrong, the day I learned that the best talent you can have is to love someone else's talent, the day I looked at the glowing faces of the people we served on Christmas Eve and realized mine was even brighter, it was the day that I learned to forgive myself that I realized I didn't just feel happy, I felt whole.
Authentic happiness comes from a source inside ourselves, we just have to believe in it. When you stop wanting and start appreciating, when you lose yourself for the sake of others, when you give up on waiting for opportunities and you make them for yourself instead, when you find your passions and beliefs and you act on them, all the sudden you'll love yourself.
And that's the key.
Because the most beautiful part about happiness is that you don't find it.
It ends up finding you.
-Brianna Lynne
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