My friend A- is always doing studies. If she is considering making any kind of change in her life, she researches it from every angle. She reads about it, she interviews her friends or acquaintances about it. I love seeing her go through this process and getting asked questions that make me think deeply about my life. So the latest is a study of happiness. Specifically, she was asking about happiness and how role models relate to happiness.

Interestingly, I had a week a couple of weeks ago in which I was regularly expressing that I was happy. I remember that week feeling very busy and productive, but not tired. I also remembered my dreams every night that week (which is not common for me), which were rich, interesting and vivid and involved many of my close friends.

J- attributed this elatedness to the longer days that we have been seeing. I would not dispute this since I know that sun affects my well-being dramatically. I am and have always been a summer girl, feeling better physically and emotionally when I am out more and have more light in my life.

I primarily attribute the change to a new proactiveness that I have harnessed. I have found much more focus in my projects. I have really narrowed down what is important to me and have made progress in integrating these things into choices around the ways that I am spending my time. This has led to concrete things getting accomplished, as well as a clear directional path ahead that I have lacked and sought for some time.

In turn, this has been a great opportunity to restructure my time and better my time management. For a while, my life has been a bit of a checkerboard, taking work when I can, running my dogs when I can, fitting in errands and self-care. This has been great for having a flexible schedule and occasionally spontaneous moments, but as I get busier, it has meant more running between things and less time to focus on any particular thing. Right now, I am in a transition process to the new schedule that I have created, but even having it as a possibility has seemed like a relief.

These issues are all, actually just background issues. I think that they provide the frame of reference for simply allowing the POTENTIAL for happiness. These things have been contributing to an overall sense of satisfaction and purpose that have my head clear and give me a general sense of well-being.

–I suppose that I should clarify this a bit since I would not want to give the impression that a sense of well being is so simple on a blog that is, in part, about radical politics. I have also been experiencing a great deal of angst lately upon thinking about the state of the world. I have been considering the community of my future children as one that is so destroyed by our culture that my children will be living with me, a complete stranger; and how wrong that is. I have been noticing the election and having very vivid fears about how bad things can actually get and having a lot of sadness around the lack of satisfactory options that I have for rectifying what the government is doing. I suppose that the sense of well-being that I am referring to a sense that I am simply doing my best and am satisfied with the frames of reference that I am making my choices within and that my current trajectory is sustainable.–

So, with all of that being said, I see that the actual manifestations of happiness come to me when I am laughing, eating a good meal or playing with my dogs. Of course, these are simply examples (and the most frequent ones). If I am having a bad day, I really just need to take my dogs to the park and watch them gleefully run around or hang out with A- or R- who will pretty much make me laugh whenever I see them.

While self-satisfaction creates the platform for my happiness, being truly happy is ultimately a collective process.