I was brought up in the traditional Chinese culture that engraved me with the idea that my own personal happiness was not a valid consideration for my choices and behaviors. The line of women ahead of me in my family all sacrificed happiness for the comfort and approval of others, or for the togetherness of the family.
My over-two-decade devotion to Christianity drummed into me the firm belief that that my ultimate goal in life should be to please God. Only in Him would I ever find the kind of peace and joy that this world couldn’t take away.
Needless to day, five years ago when I set on a journey to understand and pursue happiness, it caused a lot of confusion and anxiety. Friends pointed out to me that there were fundamental differences between happiness and joy. Joy came from within while happiness was triggered by external events. There seemed to be a more religious or spiritual flavor to the word joy than there was with happiness. In other words, joy could only be experienced via association with God.
Five years into the journey, I can honestly say that I’ve experienced joy and I’ve experienced happiness, and to me they are not that much different. Both can be originated from within, independent of the external factors. And this no longer has to be a linguistic debate or an argument of ideologies because the advance of neuroscience allows us to see the brain activities when people are immersed in joy vs. happiness. For example, scientific evidences seem to suggest that the same neuro pathways are opened up and same brains regions spring into action when a person reports intense joy with a religious experience vs. another who gets into a flow creating a masterpiece of artwork.
I’ve come to the conclusion that personal happiness isn’t a selfish pursuit for two reasons. First, if I didn’t commit to achieving my own happiness, nobody else would. I am not going to follow the footsteps of my grandmother, mother and aunt who sacrificed their own happiness for the well-being of others. They were often vulnerable to the feelings of those who they considered the recipients of their sacrifice. Secondly, I can’t give what I don’t have. When I am positive and energetic, the world is lovelier and brighter, and the atmosphere of my whole family changes. The same is true at the workplace even when the tension is building and stress mounting.
What amazes me is that happiness can be learned just like you learn how to play a violin. Your thoughts, vividly imagined and repeated, become your reality. So if you change your thinking, you change your life. Growing up, I was labeled as “Lin Mei Mei”, a female character in Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels. Lin was an orphan living under the roof of her cousin’s large and prominent family. She often felt like an outsider and was sad a lot. Like Lin, I wasn’t born with a sunny temperament and my environment didn’t help with dark mood. But I’ve always been fascinated with the subject of happiness and drawn to the people who are positive and upbeat. I want to know their secrets and be just like them. And today I am becoming one of them!
To be truly happy, you need to be committed to something bigger and more important than yourself. Otherwise you will only experience fleeting happiness that is characterized by short-lived pleasure or indulgence. An authentically happy person feels her life stands for something and that she is somehow making a valuable contribution the world.
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is a well-known phrase in the United States Declaration of Independence. Happiness is one of the “unalienable rights” to all human beings. If you are courageous enough to define what happiness looks like for you and learn to be happy by consciously and actively changing your thought process, you can remain positive, cheerful and optimistic under almost all circumstances.
“Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.” ― Daphne du Maurier
Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling. ~Margaret Lee Runbeck
Happiness is a form of courage. ~Holbrook Jackson
“A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.” – Hugh Downs
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