“You are free to believe what you choose and what you do attests to what you believe”
I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day who asked me the question ‘who is the happiest person you know?’.
Ask yourself it now. It’s difficult to answer isn’t it?
There are certainly people around me who seem to be happy but the happiest person I know? I couldn’t easily come up with an answer.
The conversation with my friend proceeded with him saying – ‘You seem happy but it’s so easy for you, you live in Cornwall by the sea, you work for yourself and you have all the freedom in the world because you are single’.
It made me smile with how people perceive the lives of others. If you ask the next person they might say the absolute opposite; ‘It must be hard for you living so far away from anything, starting a heart centred business from scratch with nothing, you must be so lonely being single and doing it all on your own’.
And the truth is, all the above are true. I feel each and every variation of the above on occasions because I’m human! I ‘think’ and ‘dream’ just like an employed person, I ‘love’ just like a married person and ‘feel’ and ‘breathe’ just like a city dweller. We are all the same.
But the conversation made me then reflect on my own happiness. What is it to be happy? I feel the ‘happiest’ I have ever been right now, despite whether I look at my life with glass half full, or half empty eyes. I asked myself why and the only answer I could think of is, right now I feel authentic.
I wake up each morning and the effort and motivation it takes to move forward in work feels like a joyful adventure rather dragging myself through days questioning the point in my work. Feeling complete deep down for the first time in my life, soothes any loneliness of not being in a loving partnership right now and walking the beach with my dog every morning watching the sunrise instead of being on a packed London commuter train makes my heart burst with happiness.
This isn’t a recipe for happiness in any shape or form. These are just MY things. My choices leading to the life I am creating for myself, from a place of authenticity.
I have started to understand and accept that my life is down to me – my choices, my creation. And that the life I am sat in right now is down to the choices I have made before now and yet they are no longer important, only the choices I make right now are. Right now I am free from the past but have a choice in creating my future.
So often we look outward and feel trapped by things that aren’t real. For me it was my past, my CV, other peoples’ perceptions, my own fears and those pesky little ‘shoulds’ we or others tell us.
Or we think that we’re slaves to the choices we’ve made in the past. But the beauty of life right now is you always have a choice.
I understand that some things in life we literally can’t change – maybe you’re a parent, carer or such responsibilities… but you still have a choice. You can choose to resist, focus on the negative, the struggle or you can choose to see differently, create opportunities for change, ask for help – you can still create a life you love from a place of authenticity.
I believe that digging deep to find out what feels right for you, being honest and truthful to yourself and others and aligning your life to that place of authenticity is possible for everyone.
So really, it doesn’t matter one teeny tiny little bit who the happiest person you know is. All that matters is how you feel in yourself when you ask yourself that question.
Pause for a moment in your day. Listen to yourself. Connect with how you really feel and use that as your guide to create a life you truly love, to make choices now, to create your own happiness.