Have you ever noticed that happiness is easier to recognise in retrospect? You can think, “I was happy then,” while honestly admitting that you might not have been thinking much about happiness at the time. You were just living your life in the moment. Experiencing it.
Happiness is part of living. So is sadness. Our eternal quest to be happy has a built-in failure switch, for life will always bring some grief, some anger, some kind of angst.
I’m starting to recognise another way for this sliding scale that goes all the way from absolute joy to deepest sorrow. Okayism.
I’m really happy in this moment, and that’s okay. I’m grieving for a lost one and that’s a natural part of life too, so that’s okay as well. Once everything is okay, whatever it is, you can get on with feeling the emotion that comes with it, watching the thoughts that crop up and dealing with life’s challenges and difficult moments with equanimity. When everything—good or bad—is okay, it puts you on a much more even keel.
So next time when someone asks me what I want from life, I hope I don’t say, “I just want to be happy” because I know deep in my heart it’s not always possible. But equanimity? I’ll be okay with that.