The Decision to Choose

We have to choose something.

The last few weeks of my life have been unlike any I’ve had before. I’ve met some amazing people. I’ve been on boats in the Baltic Sea and I’ve been at the highest point of Barcelona. I’ve chatted to Canadians and French in saunas and I’ve taught Belgians how to say they’re hungry in Irish. There have been countless unforgettable moments and all of this made me realize how grateful I am for everything I have at home.

Generally speaking, we tend to believe that happiness is to be found elsewhere. It’s around the perpetual next corner. It is the next job, or the next place we live in or the next goal we succeed in accomplishing.

But this isn’t true, and it took me looking elsewhere for my happiness to understand that it can be found wherever I so please if I open myself up to mindful gratitude. It can be so easy to convince ourselves that happiness has to be somewhere else because we are unwilling to be thankful for the things in front of us. If you constantly tell yourself that you need more then you will never ever be happy with what you have.

There is a variety of greed when it comes to happiness that it never really addressed because we’re told that happiness can be collected and stored like gold. But this isn’t true at all. Happiness is far more like the air around you. It’s invisible and it’s unlimited – but you cannot have it all. In order to live a consistently happy life you need to understand that you cannot be happy all of the time. When you breathe air in, you must breathe it back out too. You cannot breathe once and hold the air forever.

And this goes for happiness too. You must allow happiness to move in and out of you as naturally as the air does if you are to find a consistent level of life satisfaction. You will be miserable more often if you’re constantly chasing the wind. You will not be able to find happiness elsewhere if you can’t find it where you are now to begin with.

It may have taken me travelling hundreds of miles from home to understand that I can be happy anywhere but now I think I get it. Now I understand that we can choose to see the good in our lives rather than pointing out the problems.

That’s a choice we make whether we wish to admit it or not.