Friday, July 8, 2011

Selfish happiness is still happiness. The selfishness is debatable.

Do you ever snuggle under the covers and think, simply think, about what would make you truly happy? Forget instant gratification. Forget your short-term goals. Forget, even, the perfect 'dream' life. Just think about what would make you entirely content from the ideal level of comfort of the sole of your foot to the complex, needy consciousness in your brain.

Me, I don't have the specifics down. Images flash to mind, sure. My future house changes. Morphs from a seaside cottage in Maine to an apartment in a lively, small, Scottish town. Sometimes I'm with a long-term boyfriend/cohort banging out music on pots and pans and raspy vocals, despite my considerable lack of most musical ability. Or else I'm scuttling around some remote, unidentified territory, helping install clean water wells and making friends with the local toddlers. Problem is, though, I don't know what I want to do with my life. Every career option has a fatal flaw. Sometimes I see my own fatal flaw beating me as a second heart.

I think I know what I want.

I want to make connections to other people. To start a family in more ways than one. To be totally satisfied with the people closest to me, but still be open to meeting new people, really getting to know them. For me, at least, the central part of my happiness is making sure that I have those connections to people that will always bring everything else into perspective. It's so easy to look at the world and only see the bad and the hopeless. Making connections, real connections, to people, people you can always depend on, that's what makes living worth the trouble.

That's not the only thing that would make me happy. I want a job or career or whatever you want to call it that means something to me. It has to be something I enjoy or else something I feel is truly important. I want to have an exciting life so that when I'm an elderly lady I won't look back at all the things I regret not doing. I don't ever want to be filled with regrets from my past because my future can always be better. But the key to being really happy, to me, is finding people who I totally love and who love me back. And yeah, for me, that probably means at some point getting married and having kids. Perhaps this doesn't seem ambitious enough in an age of budding female power players and when everyone is hopping about, ready to change the world. I've realized, though, that what should make you happy doesn't really matter -- it's what actually does make you happy that's relevant. Perhaps I should feel totally gratified by saving a life or helping a community. But I don't. That's not to say that doing things for the greater good is unimportant or unsatisfying, but my happiness is a lot more personal. There's no use in doing things to make everyone else's lives better if you are perpetually unsatisfied. Being selfless is necessary. Being a little selfish is necessary, too.

It's fascinating how easily people make friends. Yes, there are plenty of socially awkward people or shy people or just unlikable people who feel quite friendless. Yet you're only friends with the people you're friends with because you happened to meet them. There was no fate involved. It's simply random chance. You live somewhere that places you in the same school with some other people and some of those some other people become your friends. If you had lived across the country the same thing would have happened but with different people. When you meet somebody by more proactive means, such as over the internet because you share similar interests, it's still pretty damn random that you should meet. There are probably hundreds or thousands of people who share those same interests. But you didn't meet them. You met this one person. Really, the world is just absolutely brimming with potential new friends, if only you could meet them all.

So much of who we are is defined by everyone around us. Nobody is really independent. In the midst of all this striving to 'find myself' and 'follow my dreams' and 'become my own person,' I don't want to forget that, at any given time, the best part of my life will always be the people who are there to join me.

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