Happy When… Happy Despite
On my fortieth
birthday, I made a massive self-discovery: I have been postponing happiness for
the most part of my life. I was the "happy when" type, the one who
always needed something to happen as a condition for her happiness.
Over the years, I have unconsciously deceived myself with the promise to be
happy when I achieve something substantial or reach a big goal. Regrettably, I could never keep the happiness
promise because I would set another condition for happiness the moment I was
finished with the previous one. I was always busy “doing” and never had the
time for “being” happy.
I was not alone in
this; almost all my family members and friends had the same “happy when”
attitude:
I will be Happy when
I get married.
I will be happy when
I get that job.
I will be happy when
I get my Ph.D.
I will be happy when
the kids grow.
I will be happy when
they graduate and get married.
I will be happy when
I move to the new house.
I will be happy when
I lose those extra kilos.
I will be happy when
I get my dream car.
And I was happy for
all these things… but only briefly since I had to hurry up and set a new goal. I tended to take all my achievements and
possessions for granted and aspire for something bigger. My craving for “doing” more simply exceeded
the longing for “being” happy.
Unconditional Happiness
Now that the
realization struck me like a tornado, I attempted to remember the last time I
was unconditionally happy, a time when I did not set a target and just went
with the flow. To my surprise, I had to go as
far back to the time when I was a child! I saw myself playing on the beach with
my sister, brother and some twelve cousins. My parents, uncles and aunts were
sitting under three overlapping umbrellas talking, laughing and eating as if
there were no worries in their world.
I tried to figure
out when I switched from this care-free, “just be happy for now” to “a happy
when" attitude. More questions kept buzzing in my head: was it a personal trait of mine or a cultural
thing? Was it the result of being
brought up to feel happy only when I could achieve my family’s pre-decided
goals? Did it have to do with an
outdated educational system which stressed academic excellence as a condition
for happiness and an end in itself?
Guilt-flavored
Happiness
Instead of coming up
with a clear- cut answer, the bee-hive in my head produced another sweeping discovery. I realized that every time I caught myself
feeling happy for one little thing or another, the feeling was coupled with a
sense of guilt! How can I be happy while
a relative is still sick? Or when sibling is stressed out before a final
exam? Or when a friend has just lost her
husband? The reasons to worry and the
things to fret over were always there. Deep down, I had the notion that as long
as they existed, I had no right to be happy.
Thus, happiness itself turned into a burden; it became another reason for
self-torture and entailed a sense of guilt for not being supportive or, at
least, appreciative of others’ feelings.
Thus, seizing the
opportunity to grab a moment of fleeting happiness would be ruined by my
automatic pilot taking over; it would drag me down a spiral to the real world.
My preset- to -guilt mind would shun the happiness urge and start to do its
real business: spotting a problem and trying to solve it, insisting that
happiness can be postponed but problems cannot.
Happy or Sane?
Delving deeper, I found
out that the tendency to postpone happiness is an inherent cultural issue. The typical Egyptian phrase “Khair Allah oma
eg3alo khair"- meaning may God not turn this cheerful situation into the
opposite- is proof of my assumption. If
you are with friends or family and a fit of laughter strikes for one reason or
another, you will always find a sane person volunteering to remind you of the
“sacred Egyptian phrase” as if you have no right to be so happy. The fact that the phrase has the name
of Allah Almighty gives it another layer of “fake” validity: it makes it sound
like some kind of a religious supplication as if God is likely to punish us for
feeling happy!
Why cannot we just
replace the usual" happy when" with a "happy despite" attitude?
Choose to be happy despite the pain, the traffic jams, the loss of a dear one
or the failure to get the job. If there is one thing I know for sure by now it
is this: HAPPINESS is a CHOICE. It is such
a subjective, relative, brief and elusive feeling. I simply do not know what makes you happy and
I am not in a position to give advice about it. All I can tell you here is how
the little things that go unnoticed in a busy day can make me happy once I took
the decision to be so. I can feel joyful
for something as simple as sipping a cup of tea with a friend, exchanging heartfelt smiles with a stranger, a one- day- trip with my husband to a park or
a beach, a bunch of lilies in a vase by my desk, watching a movie with my kids,
or reading a good book. Happiness is short and elusive; find what makes you
happy and grab a moment or two every day by purposefully choosing to be HAPPY
DESPITE everything.
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق