Are You Happy?

Being happy has less to do with what is really going on in your life and more to do with how you perceive what is going on in your life. Though this is really strange when you think about it, it is also true. Because happiness is mostly subjective and almost never objective. So, it is possible for someone to have literally Everything in life and be completely miserable whereas I have been to third world countries where I often saw "The happiest people in my life". So, generally speaking what you have and even who you are with is less important than how you perceive it in the first place. So "Are you happy?" only you know for sure.

What I thought would make me happy up to about age 30 was always sort of unrealistic and so it took life and experience to convince me what happiness really was. For me personally, it was being able to raise my children in the way I wanted to. So, in this regard I was the happiest when I was 32 to 37 when I actually was able to buy land out in the country in the mountains and build and A-Frame and home school my 3 children that were then ages 5 to 8 years of age. We did that until 1985 when we moved to the Northern California coast and bought a business. I wasn't happy to do this but then I moved from happiness to uneasy contentment. It wasn't until I divorced, remarried, almost died in 1999 that I got into another state of what I would call happiness and contentment that I have stayed in since 1999 to the present day. But I had to almost die for 7 months in order to be grateful for each moment of life each day before I could be truly happy once again.  So, with all of us happiness is less about what we have and even who we are with and more about our relationship with ourselves and life and God if you believe in God. I do and I find believing in God a useful thing. So, for me, believing in God contributes to my happiness. But I might define God differently than you would. To me, God is all life, substance, energy and consciousness in the whole universe. So, to me, God is everything in the universe. This is my personal experience and this makes me very happy to be a part of God's Universe.

However, happiness for you might be something very different than what happiness is for me. And everyone has to find their own happiness. This is something that is incontrovertible.