Shit, I forgot my happiness.. again

I woke up and stared at the clock:

It’s 10 AM. goddamn it.

My head is in a dump. I have been getting out of bed later and later every day. Today I’m up 5 hours later than my usual routine.

I’ve been using sleep as my escape. The last few weeks have been emotionally taxing. One day we lost the house we’d put an offer in, and the next day we found a house we were even more excited about. The day after, we got another offer accepted. Later that day the seller turned out to be a psycho.

It’s probably time to take a step back and reflect.

I realized how attached I have been to this idea of a place that would make us happy— the perfect house, the right land, good timing.

This place has become a condition of my happiness.

I am gripping for control over things I cannot control because I want a specific outcome. This is costing me a lot of energy.

I am constantly anxious and stressed. I can feel it when I wake up, my body stiff and tired even with 10 hours of sleep. I can feel myself sluggishly getting through the day, waiting for time to get in bed. I look for distractions a lot— checking my phone more, scrolling on social media, and thinking about food all day.

All because I forgot something:

The perfect house, the right land, and good timing do not create my happiness.

I create that shit by myself, within myself.

Since I forgot it, I stopped doing it. It’s crazy that you can forget to be happy. But actually, this is the default mode for most people in life. Most of us don’t even know we CAN create happiness, let alone learn how to do it. That’s why we keep hoping something or someone else will bring it to us.

That’s called renting happiness. It never lasts

We all assume being happy will come like an intuition— like eating and not having to worry about how the food is actually digested.

But if you think about it, it makes sense. It does our species no good to have everyone be a happy monk. Or to face a bear and be in an extreme state of bliss.

What’s intuitive to us is how to survive— how to worry, how to plan, and how to fear.

Being happy does not come naturally, you gotta learn and practice just like learning to play the guitar.

Most of us are unhappy because we don’t actually have the skill of creating happiness.

So this weekend, I’m going to take a step back from home-searching and focus on honing my being-happy skill.

1. Read a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books

2. Detach myself from conditions I think must exist for me to be happy

3. Stay offline and spend more time doing nothing

This process is teaching me that putting my happiness behind a goal or a future I hope to happen is the fastest way to kill happiness in every other moment.

Life is full of things we can’t control, moments we don’t expect. Why let ourselves be happy only in the predictable moments? That leaves a lot of room for unhappiness, no?

The universe isn’t trying to teach me a new lesson. Sometimes I keep forgetting the old ones.