Stop waiting

'So perhaps the most important thing to do every day is to take a moment or two to simply consider all of the things that are happening to you, in this moment, at this location, with these people, that are worth remembering. The things that make life special, that make you feel loved, and that may not ever be reproduced in this lifetime. It is simply too easy to be perpetually focused on what isn’t working, what isn’t fair, what isn’t fun — but just like the flowers we so often let die in the pots by our windows, the things we love need attention, need to be fostered, and we deserve to see them grow.

What would you do to be happy? Sometimes we set aside our happiness just to make it through the everyday. It’s not that we don’t want to be happy, because who doesn’t want that? It’s more that we overlook our own happiness for the greater good of some other thing. We get stuck in relationships we don’t want to be in for the greater good of love and the fear of being lonely or never being liked again. We work jobs we don’t really care about for the paycheck, health insurance, and employee discounts. We make it to a point in our lives where we feel stuck, trapped, thinking that anything else must be better than this, not even realizing how we ever got stuck here in the first place.

...For me, interesting things, experiences, and people are still the top things that make me happy.

There are different kinds of happiness. Orgasms make people happy. When a student tells me that he got accepted into a top graduate program, that makes me happy. When I think about how my grandmother calls potpourri “poppa-touri,” that makes me happy.

But I want us to think about happiness as self-love. It’s when you smile with your eyes. It’s when you come home for dinner and your boyfriend or girlfriend made your favorite meal. Happiness is when you’ve been scoping the city and the Internet for those Jeffrey Campbell’s in a size nine and everybody’s sold out. But then, finally, you find a pair — AND THEY’RE ON SALE! Happiness is when you notice that something is going wrong in your life and instead of letting it fester and focusing on the negative, you take charge and do something dramatic to change paths. When you make a change from being unhappy to doing something that makes you burst with glee, happiness is looking in the rearview mirror at your past self and being thankful that you’re not that person anymore.

We are afraid of happiness. Everybody wants to be happy, but having that kind of pleasure frightens us. It’s too liberating, not orderly enough. That’s why we tell ourselves that we’ll get to whatever it is that makes us happy, eventually. But when is that going to be?

You shouldn’t wait to be happy because you owe it to yourself to be your best self. You shouldn’t wait to be happy because nobody can make you happy but you. Life is sort of pointless, I mean except for sample sales and Magnolia cupcakes. You shouldn’t wait to be happy because what are you waiting for? Tomorrow may never come.'