What is happiness?

What is happiness?

I see this question often. And, of course, there's no one right answer.

• Happiness has a different meaning for each being. Yes, being. I believe that animals and beings other than humans can and do experience happiness.
• To me happiness is reading.
• It's also reading to others. Others can mean people (adults or children), or stuffed animals, or plants, or just an empty room.
  
  

• Happiness is smiling. When someone tells a joke, or a story. When I see someone I haven't seen in a while.

• Happiness is smiling when I talk to someone on the phone, that I actually want to talk to!
• Happiness is comfy clothes.

• Happiness is creating.
• I feel happy when others tell me that they appreciate something I did.

• Happiness is watching Squishmallows swing in our hammock on the balcony. Then picking one up and squeezing it = a warm hug from a cuddly friend.
• Writing lists make me happy.
• I smile whenever I see Christmas things.

• Recipes that include ginger makes my taste buds tingle, in a happy way.
• I love nature.

For some, happiness is learned.

Can we be happy during hard times? And if we are what does that say about our character?

Aristotle wrote "the happy person has the [stability] we are looking for and keeps the character he has throughout his life. For always, or more than anything else, he will do and study the actions in accord with virtue, and will bear fortunes most finely, in every way and in all conditions appropriately, since he is truly 'good, foursquare, and blameless'."

I want to be a person that has many happy moments. But I know that to be truly happy I must also experience the other emotions. I really love the movie Inside Out. It shows how Disgust, Anger, Fear, Joy, and Sadness must work together so that Riley (the main character) can have key experiences (in the movie they're called core memories) that will influence her for the rest of the life. At the beginning and into the middle of the movie it is believed that only joyful moments should be Riley's key memories. Although Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear can be hard to learn from and revisit memories with these emotions these emotions are necessary for human development. They allow us to process our experiences and help us to make educated choices in the future. By the end of the movie all of the emotions work together and Riley's core memories include all of the emotions.

Thanks for joining me here, sweet friends!

I'd love to know: What is happiness to YOU?

Love,

D. J. Lathrop