Happiness is a decision
This website was started by my beautiful friend, Megan Ruffino.
This statement has been whirling around my head for months now. When I first read it I thought hell yeah! I read some great articles and quotes on the website and believed that this statement was bang on.
Then I started thinking about this on many levels. And then I thought can you be not very happy but be happy to be?
Can you have moments?
I had woken up at 8.00am, made a cup of tea and was reflecting on what I was going to do for the day. I had plans. Washing, some grocery shopping and then a swim at the beach. At 8.30 the power went out and bam the day changed. At first I thought it was just a brief shutdown an hour later I was thinking this was one of the many 4 hour ones. So I stayed at home reading so as soon as the power returned I could get the washing on and get the water boiling so I had some drinking water for the day. After 12.30 I realised that the power was not coming on and remembered it was the government planned monthly all day outage, which runs for the entire day. Now just to let you know there are so many power cuts here that a monthly planned all day outage does seem a little paradoxical. My day completely changed. I was boiling water on the stove, after days of rain I was not doing the washing and slowly as the day wore on everything technological when flat. The exception being my kindle thank god!
At 5.30 I waited for the power to come back on and it didn’t. Then came 6.00 then 6.29. I had this sense of dread. Why wasn’t the power coming back on, was it going to be like this all night? Then, at 6.33 pm the fan in the kitchen started to slowly move, it got faster and faster. As I stood and stared at it I felt joy, real joy! I wanted to shout out a hooray or something, but with neighbours below I thought they may think I had finally cracked! But the moment was that, pure joy!
I put a light on, stood under the fan, put the kettle on to make some tea and get water boiling for my supply. I was smiling and I felt, for that short moment, incredibly happy. I felt this way for a few minutes. Then I started to think that this was bat shit crazy to be so happy about the power being on. I have had moments like these in the last few years. Moments of pure happiness that are about something so, I guess; inconsequential. Quickly after these moments, I return to “myself” and the joy passes. I am not very happy but there are definitely moments when I am happy to be.
Follow Samantha on her blog at https://www.samanthajsurrey.com/blog.
She recently stepped out of that life to travel back to her birthplace, Sri Lanka, to volunteer in an orphanage. A journey of discovery and adventure. Her blog transports the reader straight into her life there with her heartwarming and evocative writing.
- Can you be not very happy but be happy to be? - June 17, 2019
