How Happy Are You?

I was listening to the radio one recent Sunday morning when the hosts were talking about happiness.  According to them the word happy is a derivative of words like happenstance and haphazard.  When I checked out www.dictionary.com, the definition of happy consisted of terms like delighted, pleased, joy, felicitous, and flavored by fortune. 

Be that as it may, none of the terms really describe what happiness really is.  Is it marked by fortune as in "I'm happy because I won the lottery" or "I'm happy because I got a new job" (this I wouldn't know because I still haven't found one).   The song Happiness in the stage production "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" leads us to believe that this is true as happiness, they sing,  is two kinds of ice cream, finding a pencil, catching a firefly and setting it free.  The Peanuts gang believes that happiness is caused by events.

Or is happiness really a state of being or a state of mind? Some people say that it is.  You can will yourself to be happy and changing your attitude will allow you to be happy...or not.

Personally, I think happiness is a little of both.  I believe that attitude is everything and that you can will yourself to have a positive attitude.  I do this by having gratitude for everything in my life...yes even the fact that I recently lost a job that I loved.  I am grateful that I have additional time to spend with my kids and my dogs and I am grateful that I have enough for today.  I don't worry about tomorrow because truly it does take care of itself.  Besides that, tomorrow is something that I've never come face to face with and most likely never will.  I just put that out of my mind.

But I'm happier when good things happen to loved ones and to me.  I'm happier when I am doing things I enjoy like writing.  I'm happier when my house is clean and organized.  But when things are a little chaotic around here - what am I?  Certainly not miserable.  When I'm doing things like cleaning up the yard after my two big dogs, am I bitchy and mean?  Nope...well, okay some days I am,  but not regularly.  On a regular basis, I'm pretty consistent in my moods. Would that be because I am happy?  Maybe.  Or maybe I am just a positive person who wants to look at that proverbial glass as always overflowing - not half anything.  Maybe I just want to believe that things truly are going to be okay no matter what happens because even if they're not - I'll have fooled myself into being positive for just one more day.

I looked around the grocery store today at the people making their last minute Easter purchases and I really couldn't tell if they were happy or not.  Few were smiling, some were noticeably grumpy.  Is that based on the fact that the store was overflowingly crowded and the weather cold and rainy?  Or is it based on the fact that economic indicators say more of the same for a long, long time? 

I don't know the answers to this but what I do know is that as I've been experimenting with smiling at random people recently - at the store today and on the DC Metro last week (don't ever do that - whoa - experiment smiling anyplace but there) people just looked away. I immediately knew it wasn't something they experienced on a regular basis.  They didn't smile back; they just reacted by looking elsewhere as if I was crazy for being happy when the world's falling apart.

Maybe I am.  But I'm going to keep on with my experiment. I am going to stay positive and smile at people and keep believing that everything is exactly how it is supposed to be in this world.  And if that makes me crazy, so be it.  And if that makes me happy, all the better.