Happiness is the acceptance of what is rather than what you think it should be. ~ angel_luv555

Love it.

What do I think happiness is? Share what truly makes you happy?

Racking my brain, here. I don’t know if I have the answer to #1 as much as I have some observations about how happiness work in my life:

I know one thing I despise is the (in my belief) toxic, positivity, pop-psy ideas such as “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” (Maya Angelou.)

Bullshit.

The fact is, the number of things any of us experience in life that take our breath away will be relatively small.

If we wait for these or only use those to gauge the quality of our life… we’ll come up on a pretty short measurement.

An all of this is magnified by current “social” media: curated moments, one out of a hundred photos, where the lighting is just right, then color corrected and cropped.

It’s one of the reasons I ask everyone to be raw here in the Community. We can’t live fantasy. We can’t change imaginary lives. There is incredible power in speaking, out loud, reality and our goals.

So that happiness is quite a bit smaller, to me.

Happiness – to me – is living out loud, on what matters to me and those I love, even if I get a little bit banged up, in the process. In fact, it’s sometimes even BETTER if I get a bit banged up in the process: it lets me know I’m alive and reminds me of my courage to try.

Beyond that!? The small things: the hug of someone who truly loves me, a friend’s text, seeing an idea I had touching someone else’s life.

One of my favorite quotes is,

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

’nuff philosophy, dear Odmaa: How about YOU? What *small* things bring *you* happiness?

Perhaps even more importantly: what are you going to do to bring yourself those things today?