Genuine happiness comes from within

Genuine Happiness Comes from Within

Life is not perfect for anyone. It is not always sunshine and flowers. It is not always rainbows and roses. Many people think that happiness will come with the next car, house, job, or other material possession.  But that is not true. 

True happiness comes from within.  It is a state of mind that you find when you become grateful about what you already have in your life.  There are always positive things that you can see in any situation. 

We often look at others and we think they have the most perfect lives.  We compare our own lives to theirs and find that our own fall short.  Comparing yourself to someone else is never going to bring you happiness.

If you want to find true happiness,  then you need to start by looking at yourself.  Why are you not happy with your life?  What would it take to make you happy?  Do you have good relationships with other people?  What is holding you back from being happy?

Most likely what is holding you back is your own mind.  If you can get over yourself and your own thoughts and negativity then you are on your way to starting to become a happier person. 

How do we become happier?  One of the first things that you have to do is -  Love Yourself.  Accept yourself.  Sure you are probably not perfect,  but who is?  Even thought you are not perfect,  you have to accept the fact that you're not. We are all imperfect.  And that is okay. 

Despite not being perfect, we must accept our imperfections.  If there is something about yourself that is bothering you,  then you need to figure out what it is and take measures to improve yourself. 

Despite realizing that you have things about yourself that need improvement, you also must be able to be content with what you do have in your life.  Are you content with the job that you have,  the way you look, with your relationships, with your home, with your car, and other things that you now have? You must appreciate what you have now in order to feel better about your life.

You have to decide that you are a happy person in order to be a happy person.  Today is a good day to have a good day,  is it not?  Why wait until something else happens or changes in your life before you decide that you want to be happy? Nobody is constantly happy without making a conscious decision to feel happy. 

Every time you exert the effort to improve your life and yourself then you are coming closer and closer to genuine happiness.  You have to constantly try to improve your quality of life -  clean your room,  take care of your sick pets,  make an effort to do something nice for someone else, lose weight, learn something, etc.  You should always be in a state of constant improvement -  because we never really "get"  to where we want to be.  We should always strive,  every single day,  to be better than we were yesterday. 

That's all that we can really do -  is try to be better than we were yesterday. 

As long as you can do that then you learn to become a happier person. 

Negativity is contagious

Somehow I have found that people seem to enjoy my company. They find me positive and uplifting. My aunt recently told me that she loves being around me and that when I leave her she still feels good and motivated. 

In our family, we have alot of Negative Nellys. The people who complain about everything and who make you feel worse when they're gone. They sit around telling you what you need to be doing and what you're not doing that's good enough. They complain about everything in their life and everything in your life too.

Judgmental and hypocritical, it can be difficult to stay positive when surrounded by the negativity. The reason being that negativity is contagious. We are programmed to think negatively anyway. 

The best way that I found to decrease the negative thoughts in my mind has been through meditation and hypnosis recordings. I know that it sounds silly but when I had nothing else, I turned to God and to self help books.

Learning to be mindful right now and enjoy your life right now at this moment in time is very important to live a balanced life. No matter what is going on in your life right now, there is something that you can be grateful for. There is something that you can be glad of. And if there is nothing else then you can be glad that you woke up.

Life is what we make it. It is not a guarantee that you will be successful at every thing that you try to do. But it is a guarantee that you will not be if you don't even try.

I hope I find her, because I'm tired of searching

I was watching a movie about Nora Ephram earlier and I knew the name but I couldn't place her. Only during the movie did I realize that her voice has been a large part of my reading material and movies I watched growing up.

It is funny how someone can touch you in a way that they will never know, even after their death at times. This lady was an incredible writer. She is the writer that I would like to be. And she did exactly what I have thought, and exactly what I had always been told about the best writing, which is that you should write what you know.

I have always done my best writing when I was writing about something that I know. If it is about my life then I can write about it forever it seems. I can find words for weeks.

She also seemed to be the kind of person that others went to for certain advice and who would be very certain in her opinions. She seemed to come across as a very interesting person. She seems to be an understanding and observant. She seems very honest and she seems very generous which does have a way of drawing people in.

Did I become who I am in part because of anything that I may have read, or a movie that I may have seen, the she wrote? How much OD that influenced who I am and how I see the world?

Did the opinions of strong women from the 70s, 80s, and 90s shape me into the stronger woman that I am?

I watched a documentary on Gloria Steinham not long ago and she made the comment that they didn't want the women who came after them to be grateful for the rights they now have. They wanted them to feel like there was more to be done. They didn't want them to accept a little bit because then they'd accept the way that things would end up going backwards.

And they were exactly right.

Feminism took good hold with people in my generation but the two generations after me have not gotten the message. They had an anti-feminist movement on Twitter where young girls would say things that were so anti women, that it is going to set us back. It will set all women back.

I heard that the boys of today are actually the group that is least likely to want to work for a woman or be comfortable with a woman in a position of power. I didn't quite understand why that would be.

Are the boys today upset that their mothers aren't home from work with them everyday? Are they suffering from the women's movement? Or are they somehow threatened by women becoming their equals in every sense of the word? Or are they having a problem with women because of their deadbeat dad's? Or are they having a problem with women because of their fathers negative views on women? Do their fathers have those negative views on women because of the women in their lives having been influenced by the women's movement of the 70s?

If any of that, or all of it, is true does that mean that the women's movement was a bad thing? Absolutely not.

I remember my mom's mother, my granny, always telling me that I did not need to depend on a man. That I did not need to become dependant on a man. She said to me that if I was waiting for a man to open a door for me, I'd be waiting forever. She said if I wanted a door open, I would have to open it myself.

For a long time, I sort of felt that in a strong way to the point where it was odd to me if a guy insisted upon opening my doors for me. I was more of the type who if I was walking up to a restaurant and I reached the door first, I'd open it and hold it for you. If you got there first, then you could hold it for me.

But I never have been one who cared much about wanting to be the first one who opened the door. Probably because I like to look around when I walk in and I like to more or less have someone else to hide behind.

I know the reasons for that go deep into my psyche. It comes from growing up in a house full of anger. For whatever reason, my childhood years weren't the happiest of my life because my mom spent so many years miserable.

Somehow I saw that I could not, would not, live in misery. I could not be the cause of why anyone was miserable. And for a long time in my life I thought that my being born was the reason she had made decisions that ended up in her being miserable. So there was a lot of guilt there too.

Yet somehow through my grandmother's words I felt like I had something to prove. I needed to be ambitious and I needed to be great. As a small child I wanted to be a teacher. As an older child, I wanted to be a judge.

When did all of that change? When did I decide that I was supposed to be somehow in politics or law? When I visited Washington DC after the 6th grade, I remember having the best time. I saw the things I had only read about. I saw the places of history.

I saw the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and the Mall. It was astounding.

I guess I fell in love with Washington DC and I knew I wanted to go to college at Georgetown. I wanted to accomplish all of these things, and of course, I have not done those things. As you probably well know, life happens while we are making other plans.

At some point, life changed my ambitious nature went more of into a practicality. I went into Business Management, because my aunt had majored in that and I knew if she could do it then I could do it too. It wouldn't be that bad. My choices at that time were limited, or so I thought. In actuality my choices were so vast at that time, but they were unknown to me in a way that only hindsight can show you once that time in your life has passed.

A friend of mine used to tell me that I had the world by the tail. I didn't know what that meant until I no longer had the world by the tail.

Yet through it all, I had an idea of finding an idealized type of love and marriage that I don't think that anyone could ever measure up to that. I wanted to have children and be a mother, but the best mother... With the house everyone wanted to hang out in and that had fresh baked cookies everyday. But did I want to be a housewife with kids because my mom couldn't be? Did I want a mom who was there for me because she wasn't because she was working? I don't know that.

Because I have gone back and forth over wanting to do something important in my life and with helping people and becoming one who makes history and in being the best mother one could be, I have not accomplished either of those things.

At 36, I have no children, no marriage and also no divorce, a college education, but no real career or sense of self. I wonder if I am actually living the life that I want to live but at least I am not making someone else miserable along the way?

An uncle of mine told me not too long ago that I was waiting for the perfect man and that man was not coming. Maybe I am.

But I don't think so. I am waiting on the perfect one for me before I could make a commitment of marriage. I didn't want to end up divorced and in the middle of my life (hopefully the early middle), I have not been divorced. So I can say that I have succeeded at that.

I have had alot of love, more than my fair share of lovers, and many, many bed partners. But I have had no children and I still live on the same property that I grew up living on.

And I have no idea what I am doing with my life. Yet somehow I feel like maybe I am finding myself in all of this mess.

At least I hope I find myself. Because I am pretty damn tired of looking for her.