March 15, 2024

Dear Reader,

What's happiness to you?

Happiness has been many different things to me at different times in my life.

In my teens, I saw happiness as something to be pursued. Back then, becoming a happy person meant that I was living a successful life. I knew that it wasn't realistic to be happy all the time, but it also seemed that being happy most of the time was something real and worth pursuing.

Next, in my early twenties, happiness became a byproduct of progress. It was something I could freely experience as long as I made progress toward a definite goal. I would feel short, subtle moments of happiness when I completed what I wanted for the day and big, grand moments of happiness when I reached my milestones. But of course, progress wasn't so easy to make at times.

Then, in my mid-twenties, I began to relate to happiness as just another emotion. It was just one emotion out of many more I could experience. To pursue happiness meant that I was at some level rejecting all the other emotions. And by allowing myself to experience my other emotions, it meant I was allowing myself to be human. You could argue I sacrificed my desire to be happy as a person to feel more fulfilled as a human being.

Later on, in my late twenties, happiness became something that I could freely create. It wasn't as simple as thinking happy thoughts, but I found if I could make someone else happy, I could share in a part of their happiness. It was something to be shared and was fueled by acts of kindness. It was all about putting a smile on someone else's face and finding a smile on yours in the process. I may have heard it being called enlightened self-interest. It wasn't always easy, but it was always worth it.

Eventually, in my early thirties, happiness was something I could find everywhere. And I found it in the small moments that I would've overlooked in my twenties. It was seeing a dog run around with its tongue out at a dog park. It was seeing a couple walk by with a look in their eyes that no one else mattered at that moment except their partner. It was taking brief moments to acknowledge how hard others have worked so that I could live in the world I live in.

So, what's happiness to me? Today, as I write this letter, my happiness seems to be infused with all of these meanings together. At some point in my life, I would have argued that happiness was one way and why my definition of happiness was better. But right now, I am happy allowing happiness to be all of it all at once. And I'm happy to continue exploring.

Chris X