The holy grail
So, I recently confessed that life’s holy grail is happiness. This is about as cliche a statement one could make. A quick Google search will tell you that millions of people are already blogging about this and some people have achieved great success in writing books about the pursuit for happiness. Nevertheless, here I am writing about it. The fact is millions of people write about trying to be happy because it’s the one thing all human beings want. And yet, so many of us seem to have such a hard time achieving happiness or even figuring out how to work towards it.
I have been off work sick for nearly a week now with mono. I know I’m on the mend as I’ve reached the point of complete boredom being at home all day. However, as I sit here tonight with a face mask on, my heating pad at my back, a cup of tea and fresh baked cookies it occurs to me that I am feeling guilty! I am not studying for the CFA right now. I don’t have to go to work. The dishes are done, I did two loads of laundry yesterday, and 3 days ago I was running a fever of 101 celsius and yet I CAN’T LET MYSELF JUST SIT DOWN AND RELAX.
I can’t achieve happiness because I don’t know what makes me happy. When I think I’m relaxing and doing things that I enjoy I see myself as lazy. My internal monologue is reminding me that really successful people are reading, training for marathons, writing interesting widely read blog posts. Successful people, in my mind, don’t ever stop. I can hear my mother telling me that I am attributing a certain kind of success to these people but wouldn’t being in good health, having a good relationship and enjoying life be “success?”
I often think of myself as a lazy perfectionist. I want the cleanest house, the highest education, the best career, the fittest body and so on and so on. The thing is, I also seem to like to sleep in a lot. I enjoy curling up watching movies and drinking red wine. Does this make me a bad person? That’s a rhetorical question of course. But regardless of whether I can rationally answer that question, I don’t live my life believing that this doesn’t make me a bad person.
I’ve decided the first thing to do towards achieving happiness is to figure out what makes me happy. I’ve never put too much thought towards what makes me happy and I think sometimes the things that make me happy are in conflict. Even worse, I think I go after things that I think will make other people happy.
Now back to my tea and cookies. Or should I go fold the clean laundry… sigh.
Flavour of the Month 