Designing Your Life

Start Being Happy Now

// September 15th, 2009 // Personal Development

Don’t wait for a vacation. Don’t wait for a holiday. Don’t wait for tomorrow. If you don’t feel good right now then you need to.

Now

We live our life on the weekends, vacations, in retirement. This isn’t how life is meant to be. I doubt any of us are happy all the time, but the problem is we aren’t happy most of the time. You have to get out of the mindset that you will be happy sometime in the future. That you will be happy once X happens. Guess what, you will still be unhappy once X happens. You can’t base your happiness on events, instead happiness is a mindset. You can be happy anytime . You don’t need a new car to be happy. You don’t need to sit on a beach in a foreign country to be happy. You simply need your mind to be happy at any time. You can still be excited about things, but don’t feel that you need it in order to be happy.

In the movie Click with Adam Sandler, the main character finds a remote that can pause, fast forward, and rewind his life. He is under stress from his job and family. Soon he starts to use the remote to fast forward through fights with his wife, then he starts to use it to fast forward through life. Finally he fast forwards through years until he has finished a huge project for work. He finds that has missed out on a large part of his life. Soon he regrets even fast forwarding a little.

This is the problem, you miss out on life. You have a very limited amount of time, so why would you want to skip parts?

All Play and No Work is the way to go

The biggest thing is work. You spend a huge chunk of your life working, so why not enjoy it? If it is so horrible that cannot enjoy it then put a lot of effort into finding other work. I find myself often bored with my work, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t feel good. I can be more mindful and enjoy the world in general. I can try to make the best out of it. Joke with co-workers, talk to customers, try to achieve something. There are many ways to enjoy work; I just have to find ways to do it. So do you. It is a shame to not enjoy 40 hours out of your week.

The same goes for school. I might sound weird, but I enjoy school. I enjoy homework. I just don’t enjoy the stress. I have to overcome this problem of becoming far too stressed out. This stress starts to overflow into other areas of my life such as work, and my social life. I find myself far too uptight around my friends and I dread working because I can only think of the next essay that I should start the moment I get home. Thanks to procrastination I can safely say I rarely start that essay the moment after work. There have been many times I didn’t enjoy working through an essay, but that doesn’t mean I have to feel totally bad. I can at least enjoy the process. I can enjoy the feeling of getting something productive done. I can enjoy the difficulty because if everything was too easy then it would also be boring. Find ways to make the time more enjoyable, but make sure you do something to make it a good time.

Daily Life should be exciting too

I hope that your daily life is never boring enough that you want to fast forward through it. You don’t need a vacation to have fun. You can do exciting things all the time. Go rock-climbing, slacklining, try a martial art, learn something, start your own business, write. There are endless possibilities, but you have to be willing to take them. Start saying yes to things you wouldn’t normally do. Sign up for all those things you never would do. Sign up for a yoga class, learning Korean, guitar lessons, meditation groups, anything! A simply look around, a college bulletin board will give you endless possibilities for groups to join and things to try. You simply have to take a peek outside your normal routine to find something new and exciting to do.

Hard Times

When something goes wrong then you really want to fast forward. There are ups and downs, but you can’t just have ups. If you only had good things happen then you couldn’t appreciate the good things as much. There will always be disappointing times, but you don’t need to dwell on it. Sometimes it is just too hard to really be happy such as the death of a loved one, but that doesn’t mean you need to continue to be sad about it for a long period of time. Be aware of your thoughts and don’t continue to allow yourself to be sad. Replace them with happy thoughts when you are able to. Don’t feel like you need to skip this, instead just accept it.

Don’t wait for a future moment to be happy. There isn’t a better moment to be happy than now. You are constantly in the state of now, so you can’t make an excuse to be happy tomorrow. You can’t base your emotions on external circumstances, because they are too unpredictable. You must rely on yourself to be happy because you are in control of your emotions. Your emotions are not in control of you.

Photo by Vramak