It may be easy for me to say that happiness isn’t in a place when I just barely returned from Hawaii where I enjoyed the beauty and warmth…but that is exactly why I am writing this blog.
On my trip with my family there were times when one or more of us were not feeling happy, even though we were in paradise…you might ask yourself how is that even possible?
Well, one of the biggest reasons I find is that we let expectations of how we think something is going to look (like how the day we visited the volcano and the rain wasn’t what I wanted on my trip), or not everyone wanted to do the same thing all the time, or even not being able to fit in everything we might want to do, get in the way of us being happy and letting things just be!
Traveling with 6 different personalities can definitely be challenging but it can work out IF we don’t have rigid ideas of how things should look.
I love my family and I work really hard at trying to accommodate everyone and what they want to do, but this doesn’t work all the time!
So, back to the original statement – Happiness is not in a place! Happiness is a choice, granted probably an easier choice when you are in paradise, but there are still going to be disappointments and challenges no matter where you are.
As I get older, I notice I have more wrinkles and laughter lines, but as I regard myself in the mirror the laughter lines don’t age me like wrinkles on my forehead by furrowing my brow (which come from pulling faces that are not happy faces!) Not only that, happiness is something that draws people to you rather than pushing away. I like to spend time with people that are real, but they are also focused on what is good rather than the bad. Over the past few years I have gone through some things that made me feel negative, dark and almost depressed…I got to the point where even I didn’t even want to be around me, so I knew I had to make a change.
Here’s what I did: (I am lucky enough to have a coach for a husband that has taught me a few tricks) – in any situation that was bad and I felt negative about it, I looked for something I could also appreciate about it. For example, I was being dealt with unfairly and having income taken away from me – so, I focused on what I could learn from it and how it was making me a stronger person, smarter with money and more appreciative of the lifestyle I have. It wasn’t until I let go of trying to control the outcome and did this that I started to feel happy AND things started to change!
I truly believe that by choosing to feel happy everything else will work itself out!! I definitely don’t have it all figured out, and there are days when no matter how hard I try I just don’t feel happy…and that’s OK. If your unhappy days are the exception rather than the norm, you’ll know you’re on the right track!!
Stay Happy my friends 🙂
XOXO