Happiness

Hey hey ELEVATE friends! I want to start by saying how grateful I am to have received such positive feedback from my first blog. It’s so welcoming to know that so many people support this new adventure of mine ! So thank you to everyone who read my last post and are continuing to follow the blogs with ELEVATE. I was given pretty free reign of where this post could go, and I decided that I wanted something relatable and super inspiring ( I’m just a really inspiring person LOL). So to keep on the topic of positivity I’m just going to give you my view about everyone’s “pursuit in happiness”.

The biggest thing I see in people is their determination to be happy. *For any Beyoncé fans out there, even she said “my aspiration in life is to be happy” (Pretty Hurts music video, highly recommend).

People fill their lives with so many things that they believe will make them “Happy”. I put quotations around the word because of the lack of understanding we (society) have about it. In definition happiness is - the act of feeling or showing content. So pretty much what’s happening is, everyone and their dog wants to be content in life (wow high hopes!). Yet very little people actually achieve it.

Why?? Because *Spoiler* life doesn’t always work the way we want it to, no matter how much work we put in :/

Getting to a point of pure happiness all the time is pretty impossible (for anyone who is always happy PLEASE share your secret, that is as rare as unicorns). Based upon the fact that life is going to throw obstacles at you, your life will not be happiness and rainbows all the time. Sometimes these challenges can discourage you and bring you down. In other words, NOBODY is happy ALL the time! So stop believing that happiness is this goal in life and that if we work hard enough we can be happier. Don’t get me wrong hard work helps achieve goals, just not this one. (Another side note: the lows in life will make the highs more valuable! Looking at life like this is something that helped me be a more positive person)

Fortunately, happiness is a lot simpler than that. It’s not something you need to work towards. Success does bring a large sense of accomplishment and joy to your life! So keep striving for a better you, but specifically to be happy, you don’t need to take a long journey.

The feeling can come from the smallest things, meaningful or not. Today for example I looked at a spoon. Yes, you read that right. The utensil you use to eat soup with or stir a coffee. I looked at the outside of the spoon and it made my face super long and skinny and in that moment I was happy. I wouldn’t be able to explain to you why this small object made me happy but it did and that’s what everyone needs to realize.

Though people say they want to be happy nobody actually allows themselves to recognize the things that they enjoy in their daily life. Happiness isn’t this big, foreign thing in life. It’s an underappreciated simplicity of feeling lighter than normal. The feeling you get when you hear a good song, the emotions that fill you when you see someone you love, the beauty of looking at something that makes your heart beat so easily. The timeless moments that everyone let’s slip away.

I think a big part of why these small things aren’t recognized is because of the stress that we put on ourselves to do great things for our future or the focus we put on what we could have done in the past. What we really need to do is appreciate what we are doing in the moment.

Right now, as you’re reading this. Just take 1 minute to think of something that has made you happy recently. Feel free to DM me your reason of happiness as well! (Insta: @sammjau)

For me? Writing this blog makes me happy!

Don’t make it harder than what it is. Be happy!

~Samantha~