Are You Seeking Happiness? Here is a Secret

 The American Dream is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We all want to be happy and we seek happiness, and I want to tell you the secret of being happy. Understand you can't always be happy. We have this notion sometimes that we need to always be in a perpetual state of happiness. You can't. Not only can you not, but you shouldn't. You should not be happy all the time. Let me explain.

First, happiness is an emotion. It comes from a variety of places, and if you are happy all the time, then you only experience one emotion. Life and health require a myriad of emotions. When something bad happens, you should be sad. You need to have fear and hope and anxiety and joy and sadness. All of these things work together to create a well-balanced individual. If you don't have the range of emotions, you will never really be healthy emotionally. We need all of the different parts of our being to be who we are intended to be. You need to have more than just happiness to be happy.

If all you felt is happy, that happiness would begin to dull. We enjoy the sun more after the rain. We enjoy the warmth after the cold. We enjoy food more after being hungry. Sadness and despair, while not enjoyable, give our happiness that sense of pleasure. Without the bad, we would not experience the good. It is the bad things in life that make us enjoy the good things. The hard times in life make us strong, make us better people. We need to bad to enjoy the good.

Finally, happiness is ultimately selfish. We experience things with and for other people. We worry, we grieve, we feel loss. We feel happy when others feel happy, but if we are focused on only feeling happy, that draws us to a sense of isolation. When happiness becomes the priority, it will ultimately drive us to see out things instead of people. In the end, the happiness we feel will become shallow and joyless. If you spend your life chasing happiness, you probably won't find it.

To really be happy, embrace your whole life. Embrace the sadness that comes, the pain, and the hurt. Deal with the heartache, face the trials and hard times. Learn from them, grow as a person. Find hope in the sadness and look for the ray of light in the gloom. Experience the good and the bad, and the bitter will heighten the experience of the sweet. By learning to embrace all of what God offers in life, then we will find those times when we experience happiness that we are really and truly happy.