The Realization of What Matters In Life

A short writing on the perception of happiness.

For a while now I’ve been going through the journey of life desperately searching for things such as material wealth, love, and social acceptance thinking that this defined my happiness. These are common things many of us strive for, some acquire them others don’t.

What is happiness? Is it acquiring the material wealth or success in one’s career? Is it finding the one person you think you’ll spend the rest of your life with? Is it being the popular one among your peers? I’ve come to the realization that true happiness is not the external things. True happiness comes from within, things like peace of mind, self-confidence, and having integrity rich values. I believe it comes down to our perception of the situations, people, and events in our lives and our emotional response to the them.

I agree external things such as the home we live in, the spouse we choose, the career we have does have an interdependent affect on our happiness. So does any hardships or adversities that come along in life and they do come along. But the key here is what we allow to affect our happiness. I feel that as human beings our natural current state is  a positive one and our emotional state should be one of happiness and if we allow outer things to affect this state it’s our choice. It’s what we perceive, what we see as good or bad that then triggers our emotional response to them that will then affect our happiness. We have control of our responses, we have control of who we let into our lives, we have interdependent control of our lives as long as we keep that in mind, we have control of our happiness.

In conclusion life is what we make it, good or bad we decide. No one said life is going to go according to plan or be perfect. It’s a choice to respond vs. react to events, situations, and the people in our lives.

Author's Note

Ignore grammar problems, what do you think of the substance and message? Do you agree or disagree? Productive criticism is always welcome and appreciated, I'm a novice looking to learn from my mistakes.