When you’re unhappy, you can usually catch yourself thinking about how much better life could be. When you’re happy, I mean really joyful, you usually think life couldn’t be any better. So if you want to be happier, the obvious solution is to want less and appreciate more. Which is a start, but is too simplistic an end considering that if you increasingly want less and appreciate more, eventually you’ll become blissfully inert. At which point you can await your death, or you’ve reached enlightenment.
The real question is, how do you reconcile your happiness with what you have and your unhappiness with what you don’t have? Too much of either is hazardous to your emotional health, and neither one is better than the other. How do you welcome unhappiness into your life while staying fundamentally happy?
By recognizing that even though you’re happy with what you have, you’re not going to be happy if things stay as they are forever. If the unhappiness in your life is a catalyst for change, it is what balances you, keeps you growing, keeps you searching, keeps you discovering, and in the end, keeps you happy. Growing in sync with the changes in your life will make you happy with where you are. If unhappiness doesn’t fuel change, you’re miserably inert, and once again awaiting your death.
Like a river, life seems to flow at different speeds depending on how far along you are. As a young person it seems the best you can do is follow your heart, try to sync your life with your growth, and balance what you want with what you have. At least until life slows down. At which point hopefully you’re happy enough with where you’ve ended up to just walk.
