Searching for happiness

This is the middle of my story. For you it’s the first time you’ve come across it. For me it’s the life I’ve lived since before my first memories. It’s the story of my search for happiness.

Frankly, having written that I’m rather embarrassed at how that looks. It’s the sort of thing an idiot would write – and while I’m an idiot I’m not that kind of an idiot. It kinda gives a mock heroic veneer to what most people don’t think about at all, and if they do they just think of it as living life. Also I don’t think that I have really been on a search for happiness from when I was a baby. Or well, maybe I have but not consciously. So to remove myself from the rather pretentious hole I’ve jumped into, I’m trying to find out how to be happier.

This blog is to share that journey with you for a while.

Being happier

If I was at work and someone gave “being happier” to me as one of their objectives I would, rightly send it back and ask them to have another go. Obviously the idea of “being happier” is one that very, very few organisations would sign up to (although let’s not forget Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness goals – something that I definitely want to come back to look at again). But putting that aside it fails some basic tests for an objective. One of the management fads that has survived the winds of faddy change are SMART objectives and the objective to “be happier” fails on every count.

Actually, I think I’m OK with that for now. I want to explore this whole idea more before I tie myself to a course of action. I think that there are a number of things that will make me happier and I’ve been working on those with varying success for the last few years. They include:

• Family
• Money;
• Sleep;
• Diet;
• Exercise;
• Friends;
• Community;
• Outdoors;
• Learning;
• Books; and
• Hobbies.

Each one of those is a series of blog posts in their own right so I won’t go into the right now. Suffice it to say that I don’t think that I’ve nailed the balance yet and I’m not sure that the list is complete.

But, I’ve found that it’s often easier for me to do something, anything, rather than put in the hard yards of thinking about whether it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes that’s worked well for me but sometimes I have just gone off on a wild goose chase for months or even years. This time I’m going to give it space to breath.

Happy right now

It seems to be true that you get what you measure so I want to measure happiness. I don’t know, yet, how you do that.

Sometimes I can pause and say, yes, right now I’m happy. In fact an older and wiser friend of mine taught me that just before I got married. “Caveman” he said, “there is going to be so much happening on your wedding day that you’re not going to remember any of it. So my advice to you is just to pause occasionally during the day and take a picture. A mental snapshot in your head and tell yourself that you are going to remember this specific moment.”

And he was right. Most of that day is a blur but I have specific pictures in my head of having a very silly brunch with my best man and ushers; turning to see my wife for the first time as she came down the aisle; seeing my parents talking to my wife’s aunt; the first dance; and many others. That lesson is one that I try to apply now to say, to step back and look at myself to say “I’m happy right this second.” Try it. It works for me.

Happy right then

Sometimes though you only realise that you were happy when you look back. I realise that I was genuinely happy for a lot of my time at university. At the time I was trying to juggle work (both academic and for money), and clubs, and a social life, and relationships.

I thought I was so stressed with everything that I had to do but actually I was thriving on it.

I had good friends and I had the time to be a good friends to them; I could pursue wholeheartedly a ridiculously wide range of hobbies; I was intellectually challenged; I had more money than I had ever had before (as well as the time to spend it). But even amongst all of that I would somehow find the time to spend entire afternoons lying on my rather narrow student bed reading novels.

I realise that there is a thick veneer of nostalgia that will have pasted itself over those memories. Looking back I can remember events and periods that were not fun in anyway. But looking back life was good and I feel privileged to have the memories that I do.

Happy tomorrow?

So that takes me to right now. This is journey I’m on.

Having all read that back I feel I realise that there is an implicit suggestion in there that I’m not happy at the moment. That’s not true, In most ways I am very happy but there are some corners that need work. A lot of work and I’ll go into those in a future post.

It also reads as if this is all a very serious business. Which it is, but I don’t really think of myself as un homme sérieux as I’m not really. It rather looks like my writing style hasn’t really found my voice yet which is another thing to think about.

Anyway, for now, hail and well met stranger. I’m taking my first fledgling step blinking into the bright light of the internet. I have no idea how long I will do this, I have no idea whether there is a real destination. But let’s walk this path side by side for a while and when we part, as inevitably we will, I hope that it will be as friends.

What are your views? Have you tried taking snapshots of happiness? Did it work for you? Do you look back and realise that you were happy at times in the past even if it wasn’t obvious at the time? Is my goal to be happy

More importantly (and unashamedly egoistically) if you have any thoughts on my first post then let me know.  I would love to hear from you.