Happiness

Do you ever stumble on a blog and just instantly connect? It’s like suddenly seeing a tiny flower sprout up in your front yard. You’ve been looking at that same yard all winter and suddenly, everything changes. This morning while blindly surfing the internet, I discovered a new writer/blogger, Aidan Donnelley Rowley, who brings me immense joy and fully entertains. Reading her beautiful and brilliant writing comes about as close to talking to a good friend as you can get. Without actually talking to a friend. She is introspective and honest and fills her posts with questions about life.

She exemplifies one of the most important exercises we can do as writers and creative thinkers (heck, even stock brokers, real estate agents and dentists should do this on a daily basis). BE CURIOUS! Search for answers. Seek them out. Ask yourself the hard hitting questions. Try to understand something that seems confusing, overwhelming or impossible. You don’t have to find the answers, just ask the questions.

Personally, I am always trying to understand the concept of happiness. To define it.  I want to understand the ebb and flow of our emotions. How we can feel on top of the world at one minute and in the depths of despair the next. Does thinking about our own happiness, looking for it and trying to understand where it comes from, make it sneak back into its’ own shell like a timid mollusk? (Side note: Do NOT google mollusk images…there are some freaky looking things swimming around the ocean.)  Personally, I think it’s important to weigh those areas in your life that bring you happiness and find out where they are coming from.

In an interview for her site, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin interviewed Amy Wilson. Wilson quotes Julia Cameron, author of The Artists Way, and I think it so beautifully encapsulates what we all are trying and striving to do on a daily basis.

Julia Cameron put it something like this: The only screenplay that definitely won’t get made into a movie — is the one that is never written at all. We are all capable of much more than we give ourselves credit for, and what we can find along the way is that the effort itself — regardless of the outcome — can bring great happiness.

I want to do more than I think I can. I want to write, read, review, work. I want to fill my life with the things that interest me and I want to inspire others to follow their passion, throw caution to the wind and dive in, head first, into this crazy, unpredictable life. Defining happiness is impossible. It is just something we feel. We know it the minute we experience that instant rush of excitement, of pure joy manifesting itself through a wildly beating heart, flushed skin and a quickened breath. But the only way to find this joy is to experience as much of life as possible. You never know where that moment of joy is going to be found. One thing I am learning is that all of your happiness cannot be found in one place. It has to be spread out, disseminated among many different outlets and venues. A large garden of happiness as opposed to one beautiful flower. Give yourself as many opportunities for happiness as you are physically capable of experiencing. And then stop and smell the roses.