There is no one exact definition of “happiness”. People have their own definition based on their background (i.e. political, historical, education, etc.). According to Oxford Dictionary, “happiness“came from the root word “happy” which means: “1) feeling or expressing pleasure, contentment, etc; 2) feeling satisfied that something is good, right, etc; 3) full of joy; 4) very willing to do something; 5) fortunate, lucky; and 6) pleasing.” For me, happiness is a feeling of being thankful. What’s make me relate happiness and being thankful in the definition? The following paragraphs in this paper would be the answer.
A lot of things make people happy. Healthy, wealthy, lucky, achievement, and all other good things could make us happy. We want to do everything to pursue our happiness, by working hard, saving, speculating, etc. At a glance, happiness is just about money or fulfilled necessity. The following question will be: why do if we lack of those money or necessities? Can’t we pursue happiness?
In our mind, we often imagine that happiness is about big good things that we have or others don’t have. That’s what mostly people imagined about happiness: hard to achieve, expensive, and exclusive. For me, that’s no more than just a big nonsense. Happiness can be as simple as hangout with our friend, playing with our children or spend high-quality time with our family, doing our hobbies, or other simple good things. But most of the times, we just can’t feel it. We feel that they just no more than routine activities and sometimes we got bored with those. People often “walking” too fast, sometimes “running” to catch all their dreams and hopes, something that they don’t have yet, but forgetting the beautiful part they had lived during the process.
Then we come to the question: is there any key formula to pursue happiness? And my answer will be: yes, there is only one key formula, by being thankful. We don’t need waiting for success or get big achievements to be happy. All we need is being thankful. Enjoy every moments we have spent during the life process. If bad things happened, we can learn from them, and after that we can still be thankful. In other words, it is not our achievements that make us happy and then being thankful for them, but being thankful will make us happy in pursuing our hopes and dreams. A friend of mine always tells me in a simple message: “much thankful and happiness will be yours”.
Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam.
