Happiness Isn't a 'Some Day' Goal
Stop being a happiness delayer!
As humans we can all fall victim to the ‘some day’ scenario for different aspects of our life. We might envisage that ‘some day’ we’ll learn another language, start eating healthier, get a job that we enjoy, go on an overseas holiday or, ultimately, be happy. We may think we’ll feel happy when we live in a bigger house, get a better job, have more money or find our lifelong partner.
I’m more of a “I’ll be happy once I’ve got all of these jobs completed” or “once I’ve resolved this difficult problem” type of person. I’m a happiness delayer! And I have realised that this is a really detrimental way to live my life. It never allows you to fully enjoy anything, or feel completely happy, in the moment or in any particular phase of your life. It only allows you to feel happy in hindsight.
And then you become frustrated because you realise how good your life actually had been, the time that you lost worrying about your ‘some day’ and that you should have welcomed happiness into your life there and then.
I think perfect examples of being a happiness delayer can be found when you’re a new parent and you start to wish your way through different phases of your child’s development. You know, when we’re getting up several times a night for feeds and we wish for the time when our baby will finally sleep through the night. We would enjoy it much more if we realised how lucky we are to be able to do this for a child, because many people would love to have children and aren’t able to. But, we don’t, and we just feel tired and grumpy instead of tired, content and grateful. Unfortunately the tired will always be part of it, sorry!
Or when our babies need to be constantly carried and we wish they would hurry up and crawl or walk, so we don’t feel like we have a cling-on all the time. Instead of finding total pleasure and joy in this opportunity to be close to our child and to feel needed. Because I can almost guarantee that once they start crawling and walking we all realise how much easier it was when they weren’t so mobile. Just think of all that extra child-proofing you need to do around the house! We miss so many opportunities to see the happiness on offer in the moment and, instead, choose to focus on how happy we expect to be in the future.
Happiness is just like every other aspect of our lives, practice makes perfect. If we don’t allow ourselves to fully experience some of the feelings associated with happiness - like joy, contentment or satisfaction - in our current life then we also won’t be able to experience them fully when our version of ‘some day’ arrives. We won’t know how to because we haven’t practiced them. We will just create another ‘some day' as the elusive goal that will magically provide the level of happiness that we wish to experience.
This is why Gratitude Journals have become so huge in the self-development and self-care industries. Writing down what, or who, we feel grateful for each day results in us feeling more positive, less stressed, it can improve our self-esteem and it makes us feel happier. When we allow our minds to focus on the negative aspects of our life, that is where our energy goes, and it gives those negatives much more power over us. So, conversely, if we direct our mind toward the positive things that we are grateful for that is where our mind and energy will flow and the positives will have more power over us.
And the best part is that there is no correct way to do your Gratitude Journal, so you can totally personalise it to suit yourself and your work, home and life circumstances. You can do it at night so you finish your day feeling happier and with a more positive mindset, which has also been said to improve sleep quality. Or you can start your day by reflecting upon what you are grateful for from the previous day. You can create your own Gratitude Journal out of a beautiful notebook or diary, buy a specifically designed one (and there are a lot on the market), download templates from the internet, whatever works for you and whatever you think will keep you focused on actually doing it. You can have rules for yourself about how many things you want to list every day, or you can allow the day and circumstances to decide how long or short your list will be.
In line with my practice makes perfect philosophy, I prefer to complete my Gratitude Journal on a daily basis. This directs my mind’s focus toward the amazing positives I experience each and every day in my life, rather than allowing it to wander off into the dark shadows of negativity and pessimism. And by making this a daily practice it keeps the positivity, and resultant happiness, in the forefront of my mind.
Completing a Gratitude Journal has made me realise that I do have something to be grateful for, and happy about, every day of my life and that I don’t need to wait until ‘some day' to experience this highly sought-after emotion. I have wasted so many moments, hours & days of real happiness in the past, because of being a happiness delayer, and I refuse to do it any longer.
We all deserve to experience happiness, to some degree at least, every day of our lives. And we are the only thing standing in our way! I choose to practice happiness each and every day so that when any of those ‘some days' materialise I will be able to experience an even greater level of joy, contentment, satisfaction and true happiness.
What about you? What if you just allow yourself to experience happiness now too? What if?
“Now and then it’s good to pause in the pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” - Guillaume Apollinaire (French Poet, Playwright & Novelist)
Kim Harrison
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