Why
are we ok?
One of the observations that was made by a classmate was
that when a person is asked how they are, they almost instinctively respond
with being good, fine, or ok. It is never anything different. This really made
me think. I started trying to notice how often I would say the same. Turns out,
it was almost every single time. I feel almost as if society expects us to be
ok and nothing less. It made me wonder why unhappiness is unacceptable and how
this affects each of us.
A
couple of weeks ago I had a thought when I was on a run and thinking about this
essay. The main question I was thinking about is what does it take for a person
to be truly happy? This has actually been on my mind the entire semester
because I don’t feel like I am happy being here. I’ve been trying to figure out
what I need to do in order to be in the state of mind I want to be. I felt like
in almost all of my classes, they were all talking about the same thing; making
the conscious decision to be happy no matter what. I still felt like something
was missing from this though. After being instructed to try to further observe
the world around me, I didn’t really find anything that I felt was life
changing. One of my classmates shared that she had noticed that people always
say that they are ok when asked how they are. This hit something in me. I began
to really think about it. I kept thinking that in order for a person to be
truly happy, they have to first be truly happy with not being happy.
I
feel like every time I try to figure out where my life is going and where I would
like it to go, I always have to think of will it make me happy instantly. In
today’s world, we want everything right now. We don’t want to have to go
through anything in order to get what we want. I also feel like society expects
me to be completely happy with everything in life. I’ve always been that girl
who has had a smile on her face because I had a pretty easy life. Three years
ago that all changed. I had an experience that created a change in me forever. I
was no longer that same girl but I was expected to be that person still. I felt
like I wasn’t allowed to be not ok. It took me forever to accept how much I had
changed and I am still struggling with it today. I feel almost as if because I had
continued on with life like nothing had happened when I really just needed to
face it, it made it all worse. It continued to spiral out of control until I finally
began to get a grip on it. I didn’t try to deal with it until it had affected
me so much. I feel like so many people in society try to just push through any
issue that comes their way. To me this is not a good way to deal with anything.
I believe that we need to actually take the time to think about the hard times
in life and take the time to grasp them. In today’s world however we have to
always be happy. No matter how great of an issue we have, we are expected to
put a smile on our faces and act like it never happened.
I
brought my thought to the most open and social place I know of; Facebook. I asked
everyone if they thought in order to be truly happy, they had to first be happy
with not being ok. I got a couple of very interesting thoughts. A common
opinion was that you have to first be ok with where you are at in life and then
happiness will come. We cannot be worried about trying to always be happy. Not everything
in life can be perfect at all times. It just isn’t the way it is supposed to
be. We are supposed to go through trials and hard times in our life because
that is what shapes our lives. It molds us into the person we are supposed to
become. In order to for us to learn from these hard times though we have to
accept the fact that they are there and they will help us grow. We have to
learn from the hard times in order to become stronger.
I
do believe with all my heart that happiness is a decision though. One of my
favorite quotes is by Henry Ward Beecher. It says “The art of being happy lies
in the power of extracting happiness from common things.” It is each and every
one person on this Earth’s decision on whether they want to be happy. There are
so many stories of people that have such horrible lives but yet they are so
unbelievably happy. One of my favorite things in this world is to watch videos
of African children just dancing and singing. They are so simply happy yet
compared to my life, they have nothing. They have come to just love the life
they have been given. I feel like because their lives are so much more simple
and less complicated, they don’t have to worry about the unimportant things in
life that tend to cloud our lives. I need to learn how to make my life simpler
and just focus on what makes me happy. I’ve lived 18 almost 19 years of life
and I definitely know what makes me happy. I just let other things cloud that
happiness.
It
is a delicate balance to figure out the line between accepting unhappiness in
order to let it change you and making the conscious effort to find happiness in
everyday life. I believe that is one of our greatest struggles in life. My main
goal is to find that balance so that I can be happy no matter what I go through
in life. I know that I will have to go through difficult times and that I need
to be ok with that in order to take from it what I need. I don’t want to just
be ok. I don’t want to be happy just because that is how society wants me to be
but genuinely happy because I am.
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