“Happiness is letting go of what you think your life is supposed to look like and celebrating it for everything that it is.” Last month was the International Day of Happiness (there’s an international day for everything, isn’t there?). This got me thinking about what I could do to make myself happier.
My downfall is that I’m constantly holding onto the idea that happiness is a destination rather than a journey.
I constantly look towards the future and don’t pay enough attention to the reasons why I should be happy right here, right now. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but this mindset often eats at my happiness. I sometimes forget that a happy life is not supposed to be a perfect life. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that there is always a ‘best’ or ‘right’ way of doing things, and as a perfectionist, I often get trapped into this way of thinking.
We are all on a mission to be the very best we can be; to have the perfect family, to have the perfect job, to have the perfect body. We place such high expectations on ourselves, and if that’s not hard enough, we then look at everyone else around us and feel that they do it better. Social media plays a big part in this as we constantly see the perfect lives of those around us and don’t always realise that people only share what they want the world to see and we don’t get to see the full picture.
Nobody is perfect, and nobody is supposed to be perfect.
Everyone you know has imperfection in their life, and that’s absolutely okay. There is no such thing as a perfect life. There’s just life and all the experiences that come with it. It always seems that a ‘happy life’ is a moving target that you’ll never reach because every time you achieve something, you always want more. But it doesn’t matter where you are, who you are or what you have, you can be happy now without changing a single thing. Happiness depends entirely on how we choose to look at things. If it rains on the weekend, would you get upset that it’s raining, rather than just enjoy the fact that it’s the weekend?
Imperfection is supposed to happen, and accepting imperfection is a great start for turning your life around. Being happy means looking beyond the imperfections. Happiness is about loving what we have rather than chasing down the things we think we want. If we can all focus on what’s good in every imperfect moment, the world can be a much happier place.
Written by Grace Smith.
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