How To Enhance Your Personal Happiness
How often have you heard the cry “All I want is to be happy?” Sometimes this has been followed with,” Surely, that’s not too much to ask for?”
Not too much to ask for. This suggests two things for me. That the person thinks that happiness is an entitlement and that it is someone else’s responsibility to give this or make this for them.
I have had various periods throughout life when I would say that I have been happy and also other times when I have been unhappy.
I began to think about the happiness question and chose to look at my childhood in my quest for a possible answer.
My maternal grandparents lived on a farm which was very isolated. It was not on a bus route. After taking three buses then a taxi we would have to walk the remainder of the way over fields and dirt tracks to the house. Until I was nearly seven, we spent a great deal of time there. Sometimes my twin sister and our mum would go and dad would visit on a weekend. Often it was just my sister and I in the summer for 6-8 weeks at a time. The only people we saw were my elderly grandparents and an uncle who lived there too.
Other farm hands converged on us when it was lambing or dipping time.
A grocery van came twice a week, as did a baker. The butcher came once a week and a drapery van twice a year. That was always a bit of an occasion!
We had our own cows for milk. I can’t recall fish being a part of our diet.
There was a television which was switched on for wrestling on a Saturday afternoon
and twice a week for Crossroads. This was such a big event that we would all get
washed and scrubbed, then change into our best clothes to sit and worship the box for
half an hour.
We went to bed early and were up early. Papa would knock gently on the bedroom
window and meowed pretending to be a kitten. We would always go along with
this charade in delight and rise to go find the cat.
I was deliriously happy! I am able forty years later to recall in vivid detail this
period of my life.
To me, life seemed full of texture. Yet, I am sure that the majority of people would
have felt deprived leading such a narrow type of existence.
