Are You Happy Now?

I think there are two kinds of happiness: moment-to-moment happiness, and overall happiness.

A given day can swing wildly between happy and sad, but your overall happiness has more to do with overall satisfaction and contentment with life. For example, I have a loving wife and children, and nice home, and a good job. I am happy, and couldn't really ask for more out of life. But one day I might be sick, or the kids will be driving me crazy, or work is especially hard. In those moments I am not happy. But they don't really affect my overall feelings about my life. That is a lot harder to impact. It's kind of like when I'm running and I can look at my current pace or my average pace. It takes more miles of running faster or slower to change the average.

On the bad days I try to reflect on how nothing is really wrong with life, and I have no real cause to complain. I can't say that it always works, but it is helpful to remember that things do get better. 

Just my thoughts. But what do YOU think?

Comments

)en said…
I enjoy thinking about this. People are always talking about happiness vs joy and i find it interesting. I once was chatting with a friend who described her fear of contentment. I don't know if she is afraid of losing it or if she prefers a much more broad range of feelings throughout the course of her day or general life. I'm inclined to think the latter because I sort of feel that way. I said to Sean the other day, sort of freaked out, that I was afraid that i've entered into this sort of lazy contentment. Things are fine, things are good, but is that good ENOUGH? And whether or not I'm satisfied seems to be a completely different question. I wonder if I'm a little bit of a malcontent. I find joy in a LOT of things, but I always want everything in my life to have this deep meaning and this can pose problems in the mundane minutiae where it's like, calm down jen, not everything has to be that way. But the extremes can feel so intoxicating for me that the middle ground can be a little unsettling. That said, when I'm having a bad day it can feel like the total WORST, with little hope of getting out of it, which sucks. Gratitudinal reminders always help me put things into perspective though and I can reset a little which is nice. I have to think about this some more...

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