What do you need to be happy? If you adjust your frame of mind, you might discover that everything you need to be happy is, in fact, right in front of you.
A Former Life
If you’d asked me back in 2019 what I needed to be happy in life, my answer most likely would have included some (if not all) of the following:
House parties with friends, happy hours downtown with colleagues, plane rides to faraway wondrous places, huge live music concerts, shopping at the mall with my mom, road trips around the country, networking events where I can meet new people and form connections, trips to the pool, hugs every time I see someone I love, big family dinners, summer barbecues at the Lake, group camping trips in the summer…
…and on and on and on 🙂
But then, 2020 came. Life changed.
In the midst of the COVID pandemic, if you’d asked me that very same question – “What do you need to be happy?” – just a few simple things may have come to mind:
Healthy food to eat. Clean water to drink. A safe place to live. A warm bed to sleep in. Daily (virtual) chats with the people I love. The ability to play music. The outdoors. A knowing that I’m serving the world around me in some way, shape, or form each day.
And do you know what the best part of that second list is?
Even in the midst of the isolation and loneliness that the pandemic brought to me as well as so many others, I still had all those things.
And the first list? You guessed it … I had NONE of those.
What do you need to be happy? If you’ve got a list of pie-in-the-sky items, you might be feeling frustrated with the way life looks right now. But if you can adjust it, mold it, and simmer it down to what’s truly essential and at the heart of things, you might just find you’re pretty happy with what’s right in front of you <3
