Every morning my husband Mike and I enjoy our first cup of tea in bed while listening to a podcast, and today it wasn´t different. As the podcast guest of today talked about happiness, I couldn´t help thinking that the world needed more of that sort of happiness explanation. You see, in my opinion, we have over-idealized happiness, we tend to think that happiness is euphoric, adrenaline filled and, most of all, hard to reach. We go day to day letting the small moments pass us by without realising that we are, indeed, being happy. Let me explain it with an example; my day today started with the smile of my husband saying good morning and giving me a kiss, my heart rejoiced with that. Then one of my best friends called me from Puerto Rico, he does almost every day, but today it was different, today we just talked non-sense for about ten minutes, laugh out loud and said goodbye, that left me with a smile in my face and with the warm feeling that cultivating a friendship (even from afar) gives you. Then my favorite time of the day came, a cup of tea in bed with the love of my life while listening to something interesting together, that made appreciate that the simple things are the best. The morning keep its course and I got a call from an auntie saying that she wanted to help with my social project, we had a heartfelt conversation and that left me feeling as if I was on the right track with my life mission. Then, to close this Wednesday morning, I got an audio message from my best friend that lives in the UK asking me -while laughing hysterically- how comes that the poop of her baby smelled like popcorn with butter? It was a wonderful moment, we are separated by thousands of miles but still are SO involved in each other's lives, that made me feel so grateful for her. After all that I thought "This is what happiness feels like", a collection of small moments that make you feel something, things can be hectic, hundreds of other things can happen in a day, that don´t allow us to notice that we are being happy. We tend to think that happiness comes from uncommon moments but if we look around our day to day we will find precious moments that mean much more than we think, like dinner time with family, the feeling of a great song coming up on the radio on your way to work or the joy of the first cup of coffee in the morning. Happiness is there, in the normal moments that we choose over and over along our lives but, apparently, we can get used to being happy and not realise when we are feeling it. So, I want to invite you to do and exercise, tonight make a list of three things that made you happy today, write it down as descriptive as you can, you can´t write "I´m happy I have a job"; it has to be a moment, for example, "Today I was happy when I to got seat down in my balcony to write my blog, the day was perfectly warm and the sky was blue with great white clouds. It was a calm moment, and I really needed that"With this exercise, you will be giving yourself the gift of noticing how happy you actually are every day. Are you going to give yourself that gift?
