The easiest way to a happy life? Recognize the ways in which you already have it.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time seeking out ways to improve myself and my life (and wrote a book on much of the same), it’s a topic I know something about.
It’s easy to get on the treadmill of constantly seeking, constantly pushing ourselves and reaching for the next great thing. But in all reality, that next best thing might be exactly what’s preventing us from finding actual contentment where we are.
Let me share a little backstory.
I was born & raised in the midwest of the U.S. Partially as a result of the always-on American culture, and partially as a result of my own somewhat-addictive personality, from a pretty young age I started seeking out ways to be (and feel) better. From obsessing over physical health & nutrition (hello, eating disorder), to insisting on a perfect 4.0 grade point average at school (check), to throwing myself into an exhausting amount of extracurricular activities…not to mention doing a whole lot of people-pleasing and sometimes neglecting myself in the process.
At one point I was working fulltime, pursuing a master’s degree, getting my yoga teacher certification and teaching yoga classes, coaching others on health and fitness, as well as following a pretty rigorous personal training & nutrition regime myself.
Now, all of things are perfectly well and good, but any of them individually take up a pretty significant amount of mental space. And combine them all together? Well, you’ve got a perfect storm for exhaustion and burnout, and that’s exactly where it led.
My constant pursuit of more, better, busier, and more impressive felt satisfying for awhile; I was impressed with myself being able to juggle so many balls, by basically just putting my head down and pushing on. But I was also ignoring whether I was actually enjoying life in the process. It couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t.
One day while giving my brain a rare break from all my activities with a film night, something clicked…or…unclicked, perhaps. I needed something more.
As I let myself be carried away by the story (P.S. I love you, which remains to this day among my favorite films) and the landscapes of Ireland rolling across the screen, I realized there was something within me that was deeply unsatisfied, not just despite my constant pursuit of improvement and greatness, but actually in part because of it. I’d been ignoring it for awhile, and it came to a head at that moment.
So what did I do? Well, I looked up flights to the Emerald Isle, of course. A few days later, the wheels were in motion, starting with getting my first-ever passport and continuing right through what became a 6-month trip around western Europe, and among many others, one of the biggest lessons it taught was that it was this:
When I stopped chasing after happiness, I found it staring me in the face.
From both planned and impromptu homestays, to camping on a permaculture farm, to housesitting, to hostel-jumping and vagabonding, and even staying in a castle for a writing retreat, for once, I was anything but the traditional definition of “productive,” and my focus wasn’t directly on improving myself or finding happiness…but somehow those exact things started falling into my path, in moments of both solitude and community.
It was as if the universe (or God, or however you tend to think of these things) was giving me a nod of approval for having finally slowed down and appreciated what was happening around me and what was already within reach.
Now I’ll grant you this — there was a LOT happening around me. For the first time I was experiencing new cultures firsthand, navigating unfamiliar surroundings, sometimes drowning in a sea of foreign language, etc. To a certain extent I had no choice but to be fully engaged with my surroundings. But the key thing here was that I’d finally put myself in such circumstances — to let go of the constant pushing to which I’d subjected myself for years, and to just follow life where it was beckoning me to go.
What’s more, finding a sense of engagement with the present doesn’t require booking a one-way trip abroad (thank goodness, because of course it’s just not accessible to everyone, and I was in a privileged position to be able to offer that to myself). In any case, recognizing the sources of happiness present in our lives can very much be an everyday kind of practice. You could even do it right now. Really.
Your morning coffee, the sun streaming through the window, your favorite song floating in the air…
I’m not saying these things erase our problems or make for a perfect life…but where we direct our attention has a huge influence on how satisfied we feel overall.
Put another way, the secret is gratitude for what we have.
It’s a concept that’s been shared and re-shared, and it remains a simple and honest truth. Instead of reaching for always more, always better, if we can settle into where we are and what we have and enjoy it to the fullest, recognizing what is already good, life itself becomes good.
