Searching for Happiness

We are on our way home from another great weekend with our Rochester, New York friends. Our annual visit has become a much loved tradition. Each year we explore interesting places in upstate New York, and spend time shopping and overeating. These traditions make us happy and they comfort us. Having time to be with our friends and talk about our lives helps me recognize what we have and appreciate it even more.

The search for happiness can lead some people in the wrong direction. Some believe that happiness is the pinnacle, achieving and maintaining happiness being the ultimate life goal, but spending time with our friends this weekend helped me realize what the pinnacle really is…accepting and living out the life you are living.

As we sat and talked about our families and the stresses we share in raising children and making our way in our marriages, I came to believe that my happiness is working through the tough stuff. Difficult relational moments with my husband, frustrating and sometimes excruciating interactions with my children and  mind numbing repetitive days of sameness that make me feel like a hamster on a wheel. All of these things that on a bad day make me want to run away, I realize now are the true definition of every family. We have different homes and cars and cities, but in the end we all face the same struggles. Once again I learned that looking at others and judging my happiness and life as less than someone else’s only cheats me of seeing the true happiness that I have.

My happiness lies smack dab in the middle of thrashing it out with my husband and smiling and laughing at the end of it or having my daughter (who just last week was sick of me) tell me she missed me when she went shopping on her own with a friend. Those little tiny moments are what create my happiness. To think that those moments strung together one after another with no break is happiness is cheating me of the growth that comes from the hard stuff in life. The hard stuff is where we become real thoughtful, understanding and giving hearts. The hard stuff is where we learn about loving someone enough to sacrifice a little of yourself so that they can be happy too.

I am happy. I have the best, most dysfunctional mess of a family, but it’s my mess that I helped create and I love it. I love it so much that once a year, I pack up this mess and drag it across the country to share it with friends. That’s how nice I am. I also appreciate that our friends share their mess with us, it’s a great tradition. There is no 24/7 happiness, it is an uphill battle just to get 24 hours of happiness so take my word for it and stop looking around for happiness because it is right in front of you in that big mess you created.