Will I Ever be Happy?

At one point or another, so many of us have asked ourselves the question, “Will I ever be happy?”   

In today’s society, figuring out how to be happy seems to be the most coveted thing of all.  Whether we believe we can attain it through fame, love, our career or something else may differ from person to person, but the desire to be happy is consistent for us all.  In fact, not only do we want happiness for ourselves, we want it for the people we love.  We hear parents say all the time, “I just want my kids to be happy” or partners say, “if something happens to me, I just want my partner to go on and be happy.”

This is a beautiful sentiment, but did we ever stop to ask ourselves whether living happily is a realistic thing to want? Sometimes it feels like the ever-elusive thing we all keep chasing, but never really seem to grasp.  

Is it instead possible that by aiming to be happy that we’re setting an unrealistic expectation to begin with?  Well, yes.

But why?

It’s important when we ask ourselves, “Will I ever be happy?” to first clarify that we can feel happy at times.  We can - and hopefully do - feel many of the positive emotions at times such as joy, enthusiasm and inspiration to name a few.   However, happiness is an emotion - meaning that like all other emotions, it is by its very nature temporary or fleeting.  Expecting to feel happy all of the time is like expecting to feel excited all of the time, or to be having fun all of the time.  

Because we’re human, experiencing negative emotions, at least on occasion, is pretty much unavoidable.   As human beings, not only are we capable of experiencing a wide range of emotions, we’re actually designed to. Where many of us seem to have gotten a little tripped up was in believing that we could experience all of the positive emotions all the time, without experiencing the negative ones. 

But before you get upset and feel doomed to live unhappily ever after, there’s a big BUT to all of this:  we may not be able to expect to feel happiness all the time,  but we can reasonably expect to find contentment, or equanimity.  Another way of saying this is that it IS realistic to not expect to feel unhappy for the rest of your life. 

Equanimity can be thought of as evenness or stability of mind - and it comes from tapping into the internal peace that lies behind our ever-changing emotions.  Equanimity basically says, “Sometimes things are great, sometimes they’re not.  I accept this as the way it is.  When they’re great, I’ll enjoy them.  When they’re not, I’ll accept them and know that it won’t last forever.  I can experience myself as the awareness that experiences all of these emotions - knowing that I am not them.”  This doesn’t mean we don’t feel our emotions, we do.  And we allow them - in fact, we even invite them in.  What equanimity means is that we don’t believe we are our emotions - we can instead view them as messengers that may be trying to tell us something and also simply as a part of being human.  This is a very different way seeing things than what most of us learned.  

The beautiful part about this inner peace is that it is not something we have to create - it’s something we uncover. It already exists within every single one of us - we just have to cultivate a relationship with it.  One of the most effective ways to do this is through one of the many ancient practices that help us to see that we are not our thoughts or our emotions - we are a vast and ever-present consciousness that contains all of these things.  These practices include various forms of meditation, yoga nidra and many others.  Like getting to know a new friend or lover, you can think of it as a relationship that has to be built.  It takes time, patience and consistency.  But like a best friend or partner, it also has the capacity to be deeply meaningful and even life changing.