I have never been one of those happy people who smile all the time. I have never been able to feel better just at the thought that there is always someone in a worse situation than mine. I mean, how can I relate to a starving kid in Africa and all of the sudden feel grateful for being able to afford a steak? Happiness itself is a very vague notion and I would be a hypocrite no to admit that what the kid in Africa and I need to have in order to be happy might be very different. You could say being happy is not about having things, it’s about giving, sharing, loving and all that. Which is true to some extent. Being surrounded by people I love and who in return love me, fills my heart with joy and warmth. But so does affording to buy books, go to the opera, travel, or a new pair of shoes. Of course it’s not the same kind of happiness, many would say, but since when should we divide happiness in that worth feeling and the frivolous one? As long as I feel good, I see no reason to do so. A life full of Manolo Blahnik shoes and no one to love me would indeed be sad. And a life with someone to love me and nothing to wear on my feet would be just as sad.
Even though I’m not one of those people who are happy all the time, I’m not one of those who don’t have the ability to be happy at all either. And this is something to be grateful for. Sometimes is the perfect blue sky, other times a good book or a weekend in Paris. And believe it or not, most of the times is very small things like meeting a friend who’s going through difficult times but who hasn’t lost his optimism, sharing a horrible, microwaved pancake with my best friend or my mum posting on my Facebook wall that she misses me. All we hear since our early lives is that money doesn’t bring happiness, that it’s wrong to desire big and expensive things, that we should always put ourselves in the shoes of those less fortunate, appreciate what we have instead of complaining for what we don’t have and so on. In other words, we should all be the Dalai Lama or Mother Theresa. Call it Western civilisation brain wash, shallowness or whatever you want, but I never tried to be them. And this is precisely because I don’t think certain kinds of happiness are better than others. Just to be able to feel happy is enough for me, or at least enough to actually be, happy.
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