Estefania Caceres (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer
This article was composed with the assistance of artificial intelligence
Sometimes it’s hard to understand what the true meaning of happiness is, because maybe we grow up in a space that encourages achievements, achievements and more achievements for reaching happiness, or the idea that we should be happy in all phases, moments and activities of our lives. These misconceptions put happiness as the ultimate goal of our lives and shut down feelings, experiences and situations that could be opposed to or just different from being happy. And when we are not open to feeling, experiencing and living all of these feelings and colors of life, we are closing ourselves to what really matters. We are not growing as humans, we are not growing intellectually or emotionally, we are not open to build new or solid relationships, we are not learning from our emotions, and most importantly, we are not really happy. Because happiness comes when we really know and recognize our emotions and we can be with ourselves in the highs and lows.
It is important to know that our losses and tears are there to communicate something important to us. They are as worthy to be listened to as the laughs and giggles. It isn’t honest and it is not fair for us to just engage with our journey when things are good, when things are more on the joyful side, when we have things to celebrate or when we are in our high moments. It isn’t smart to put our feelings and experiences in the dirty laundry basket when they aren’t walking on the happy roads of our lives. As we all know, the dirty clothes unattended will accumulate and we will have to deal with a big mountain of dirty clothes sooner or later, because we cannot ignore them forever. We need to walk the other roads too. We are not meant to live only pursuing happiness; sometimes we just need to walk a new path closer to our goal or just close enough to the joy we always yearn for, or a different path that would help us discover a new meaning of happiness in our lives.
As a professional I saw how tedious it could be when a new task or role was assigned to us, without the option to choose or decline it. But we accepted the responsibility, even when we are not happy at all to have to. We learned to perform what was expected. We also admitted that we learned new skills or ideas, and sometimes we ended up enjoying the new path and happy to be able to do a new thing. At the beginning happiness wasn’t the goal, but that doesn’t mean the journey lost its value. In the end, all journeys have a purpose in our lives. Everything has its reasons, some are bigger than others, but all worthy to be lived, felt and listened to.
I recognized in my early teens it was sometimes hard to understand that happiness couldn’t be the main objective of all my decisions, because some decisions take you through challenging paths, but you need to walk those roads in order to achieve something bigger or get the skills that will help you move forward. Now as a mom in my 30s, I really know happiness isn’t always the choice, but we learn to listen to the true purposes of our journeys and be honest with ourselves, and recognize the value of the path we need to walk through now.
In the end, if we try to relearn what happiness really is, we can connect with why happiness isn’t the be-all and end-all, as maybe past experiences, society, our parents and our culture taught us. We can learn again how to listen, engage and express other emotions, and most importantly we can learn to accept life is meant to be lived in its full spectrum of colors, flavours and more, and most of the time that spectrum isn’t pointing to the path of happiness. But that doesn’t mean that we are going to be on that path forever or that we are far away from achieving happiness. There is always a possibility to find joy in the most unexpected journeys of our lives.
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Estefania is a Dominican-Canadian writer living in Canada with a professional background in telecom and project management. She has been writing for as long as she can remember in her native language, Spanish. She is now writing more actively again, exploring English and even Spanglish (Spanish and English). She is a loving mom and wife who enjoys supporting others in many ways and is always happy to help.