Perfect Happiness?

"You're always laughing and so happy."

A couple of years ago, one of my best friends told me this. I can't remember my reaction, but I do believe I almost laughed in her face, being in the midst of the teens and their emotional drama. And yet, at the same moment I remembered a comment made by another friend: "Thanks for being so happy." It baffled me considerably, and I even wondered, "Why is it that they think I'm so happy? Am I a hypocrite if people think I'm always happy when I'm not?"

For the past few years, I have often thought about it--happiness. We are commanded to rejoice, and yet so often we have things, both internally and externally, that pull us down. I believe that's what's so confusing about life, and what makes some people find it worthless: we feel the need to be happy, and yet we don't know how to be when everything seems to be fighting against us. Sometimes life even gets so confusing that the things that are supposed to be joyful and comforting bring us to the point of tears of sadness, and we wonder, "Why am I crying? I have every right to be happy, but I'm still crying."

We all want happiness. We all try to find it in our everyday lives. Some few of us may indeed lack true happiness, but most of us actually have it. We may think we don't, being caught up in the latest downhill slope with all of its confusions and worries, but we do...at least I have come to believe so.

There's always something to be happy about. Just being alive or living in a beautiful world with seasons and nature is something to be happy about. We all have happiness, true happiness (not the artificial kinds), throughout life, it's just difficult to remember this in the midst of sorrow and anger. 

I believe, however, that we are almost always happy. We are happy around "kindred spirits" and people who matter to us, we are happy doing things we are good at or like to do, we are happy when we impulsively do the right thing, we are happy when we see something beautiful, and I could go on and on. We may not always feel it on the surface, but it's always there if we look for it. It truly is all about perspective, and what we want, or are willing, to see.

Trials, I have found, can even be a source of happiness, even if we only see it years down the road. The experiences that try us to the very breaking point, are often the ones we remember. Why? Because these events, if we come through them the better, help us to grow a little and we find that we are happier. Change used to always be a hard one for me, but now it fills me with curiosity and happiness, because without it we wouldn't be able to become better and we wouldn't be able to learn and to prove ourselves.

It's been at least two years since my friend complemented me, and I think I've found that, out of all complements, happiness is the best. It's the compliment I want to be worthy of the most, not because I would need it, but because I wouldn't need it.

Perfect happiness? Perhaps it wouldn't be so rare if we stopped thinking it so, or looking for it in the wrong places. Perhaps it is more than possible. Smile, and you may just find that it's been walking next to you this whole time, just waiting for you to look up.