So you’re eating a diet of immaculate nutrition and following a vigorous balanced exercise plan, practicing yoga and meditating first thing, getting 8 hours of sleep each night and ticking everything off your to do list each day.
But, you can’t remember the last time you properly laughed from your belly, or went outside just for the joy of breathing in the air and taking a walk with no music and no distractions.
It isn’t often you sit down and have a heart-to-heart walls down chat with someone, because its much easier to just skim the surface and have the same conversation each day, and anyway you have to get to yoga/ the gym/ a meeting/ your phone. You spread a smile on that face and carry on, finding comfort in the structure of your day. You go home, you go to sleep and you do it all again the next day.
You do this over and over, in pursuit of a sense of wholeness and completeness that constantly evades you, that is always just around the corner, because each day you are so busy planning forward and sticking to the plan that you forget to live, now. Your mind lives in the future, imagining what it will be like once you’re in a better place, when you have more money, when your body looks different, when somebody loves you.
You don’t even recognise that your bank account is full enough for what you need, you don’t notice the beautiful man who holds the door open for you every day, you don’t notice how good your food tastes. You don’t notice the innate wisdom of your body as it protects you and supports you.
There can always be more, better, bigger, richer, happier. But we never get there, unless we enjoy being here. Wholeness is here and now.
Life is messy. Happiness is messy. A whole and happy life is messy, unpredictable, it’s colourful and psychedelic and a lot like a children’s collage or finger painting of flushed cheeks and sandy toes, of sleepy lazy mornings and surprise evening visitors, of things not going to plan and being even better than you could have planned. Surely, the universe has something more creative in store than we could find in the depths of our imagination?
Happiness is when you snort tea out of your nose because your dearest friend makes you laugh so hard that you lose all decorum, and all control. When you get blisters on the backs of your heels from walking in hiking boots the wrong size, because you loved the walk so much you barely noticed the discomfort. When you get completely lost in a new city and instead of feeling scared, you feel intrepid and inspired. When you are so deeply immersed in something that bares your creative soul that five hours trickle by without you even feeling the time passing.
Perhaps theres a little something missing in your picture of perfect health, if it all feels a little too clean and concise, if there’s no room for spontaneity and the occasional ugly laugh.
Happiness isn’t all clean lines and airbrushed skin. It is complete acceptance of flaws and mistakes and mess, right here and now. Happiness is believing that something wonderful is about to happen, and accepting that it will look and feel so different from anything you ever could have planned.
Happiness is here, now, in all its imperfection.