A dialogue on happiness

So tell me, what makes you happy?

Why do you want to know?

Well I don’t know, everyone carries this question all along, all through their lives. It seems as it is a never ending conversation. And to be honest, I don’t get it.

You don’t get it?!

No.

What is it that you don’t get?

I don’t get it why people keep asking this question over and over and over again, and then drop it. When they start getting close to an answer that may seem to get them slightly closer, they drop it. The idea of taking action freezes them. These conversations, like the one you and me have now, get lost, get dusted, get hidden. People run away as fast as they can from what they figure out it would make them happy.

Ok.

Oh, common. Don’t play smart. I’m serious.

Sure you are. You’re too serious for your own good.

So what now? Isn’t this a serious question to ask?

Sure is, it is just that you must take life with a smile. Especially the hardest of moments, you must take them with a smile.

You’re deviating the conversation. I want to know what makes you happy, miss Happiness. I’m tired of you, too.

Huh… Ah, sweetheart, may I hug you now? No, obviously not. I’d make you seem so silly, right? What makes me happy – what made me happy – was my having decided I want to be happy. No more, no less. I just told myself one day: I WANT TO BE HAPPY. And so it became my every day. My actions, my words, my loves, my sorrows, they all started to fit in. It all became so easy, in a way. Once I had chosen I wanted to be happy.

People want to be happy. But they don’t want to do become happy. Get it?

Phuuu…

Sweetheart. You’re so tensed. You’re so unhappy. You’ve set for yourself these thousands of rules and you wouldn’t be able to say if they were really yours or if they had been imposed on you. You wouldn’t be able to say if you were living your mother’s life, your father’s life, your brother’s, your friend’s… The life of every person who at some moment in your life thought they might know better than you did. You’ve been told what was good and what was bad. You’ve been obliged to feel someone else’s feelings. You’ve been forced not to laugh when you felt like laughing. You’ve been made guilty of not suffering when everyone else seemed to be suffering. You are simply lost. That’s why is so hard to find an answer. Because you don’t know who you are.

Well, I know who I am. I know who I am.

Are you happy?

I don’t know what happiness is.

Happiness is what you want it to be. What makes me happy, is simply do, feel, be, all that I want to do, feel and be. Is allowing myself to breath, to feel, to act, with a bit of compassion towards myself. To commit to what is important to me. To chose, every single day, to be happy.

I am scared.