Who’s Responsible for Your Happiness?

Recently, during one of my personal reflection sessions, I was faced with a challenging question that I’m going to share with you, “Is it possible to make yourself happy when all around you seems sad and lost?” Maybe you have to wait for someone to come along and change your perspective on things, or take you out of the house and do fun things together. Or maybe, you are the one who can bring joy to yourself. There are times in all our lives where nothing seems to be going our way; no matter how hard we try not to lose sight of the important and beautiful things, we still find ourselves wanting to stay in bed all day and think about what a downhill we’ve taken these past few days, weeks, or months. It is very easy and normal to get discouraged when something goes wrong, or when it looks like your efforts do not meet the outcome of your work, but I’ll say this to you: No matter how hopeless the situation may seem at the moment, it can only get better from that point on.

Even in the middle of the darkness, you will alway find a crack in the wall, letting the light through.

We’ve all read and are familiar with the children’s stories where the damsel in distress waits for her heroic saviour, a prince or a knight to take her away from the suffering she’s going through and have a happy and fulfilling life together. This idea has been rooted in our minds since childhood and, don’t think that only women’s minds work this way, men’s do too; it is a simple human thought process, “Since I’ve tried so hard to keep being positive and keep being happy, and still it hasn’t worked, then I’ll wait for someone else to help me be happy again.” The issue that I have with this way of thinking (we don’t always think this way but it is very common and reoccurring in our daily lives), is that once we start waiting for an ‘outside help source’, we’ve already settled for the fact that we can’t be our own helpers anymore. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing bad with accepting help from someone to get better or happier, every normal functioning human needs someone else by their side; my point is this: Do not settle for unhappiness with the hope that one day someone new will come and pull you out of your sadness!

No one can possibly know and ‘figure you out’ as well as you know and understand yourself, this is a fact. Once you start analysing yourself, you will learn and recognise so many things about your being that were a mystery before; after having done this, the next step is to accept that any change in your life can only come from within you. Sounds cliché but it’s true; your mind is such a beautifully complicated part of you that it possesses all the power you need to start changing a bad situation to a good one. No matter what it may seem like at the moment, you DO have the power to keep/make yourself happy at any given time and place. The way I see it, the mind is like a ‘converter’ for your soul; all the happiness that your soul possesses is ‘converted’ into something that your body can actually feel and experience. Your mind has the power to join the abstract with the earthly touchable; soul and body. And this is why no matter what happens, you can always find strength within to be happy again and not lose sight of the beautiful things in life; because the happiness and positivity that you possess in your soul are of an endless amount.

Next time you feel like you’re going towards the downhill, just think of how inconceivably easy it is for you to make an effort to re-find your happiness. You will see that once you start believing that you possess the immense power to be (and keep) happy, there is nothing that can push you down.

‘Till next time…