Today, I remembered something I was contemplating about 20 years ago. Back then, everything seemed simple, but it took me a whole year of struggling to recall that simple truth I once shared with Aunt Nina, who’s 50 years older than me… Aunt Nina shook her head and didn’t believe me. More precisely, she knew that she was older and knew life better. That a young twenty-five-year-old girl, who had known very little about life (except for my mother’s death, childhood sexual abuse, the loss of my father—alive but no longer the father he once was, and a few other tragedies), couldn’t teach her how to live.
Because she couldn’t know anything about happiness.
I’ve grown up. I’m 45 now. And suddenly, I remembered myself as a 25-year-old. And I realize that back then, I knew exactly. I knew so many wise things about life, and then I forgot. I lost it. I grew older and “experienced.”
But happiness is very simple. You just shouldn’t build it on anything outside of us. Because all of that can change in an instant. And the only thing we can rely on as a source of our happiness is ourselves. It’s how we think, what we think about. It’s how we feel. And it’s the feelings we send not just inward, but outward, into the world.
Long ago, that twenty-five-year-old girl “without life experience” already knew that the only way to prevent something outside from hindering our inner happiness was to love it. Or, in other words, simply send love to it.
My decision is mindfulness. Finding that inner core that will shine with happiness regardless of the outside world. As much as I can. And I really want to return to that state—acceptance, humility, and sending love.
It’s long overdue.