Many years ago, my very little Scottish niece was visiting with her mother. She was crying desperately because she’d been told she couldn’t do something she wanted to do. She cried out to her mother in the most delightful Scottish accent, “but Mummy, I just want to be happy!” That statement has stayed with me all through these years, and I think about it whenever I’m with someone who is feeling stuck, or frustrated. Her very congruent statement sums up what we all really want in life.

It’s a strange thing, happiness. Sometimes it feels like the more you seek it, the harder it is to find. What does it mean to be happy? To be laughing with friends? Yet, we can laugh with friends and still feel unhappy inside. Then again, happiness can be such a fleeting thing. A feeling of elation in a moment in time, then it’s gone. The search for happiness can create real challenges in life if it turns into a relentless pursuit of the “thing” that we believe will make us happy – money, a partner, a different job, a new city, new shoes/ clothes/jewellery/car, etc, etc. But then we are placing almost unrealistic expectations on that thing/person/job/city to give us that “happy feeling” (whatever that actually is), when in reality, it is never going to meet our needs to the level we expect it to – that is, the initial joy of obtaining it eventually dissipates into something more mundane or a sense of dissatisfaction, and the cycle starts again.

We can end up searching for it through trying to obtain accolades, or by living a life of constant comparison (via social media, unrealistic societal standards) and that old nugget, FOMO, where the grass seems always much greener than where you are standing. Then we can end up living a life in limbo, never arriving and never seeming to get anywhere. Feeling stuck and unhappy.

Perhaps what we really need to be searching for is contentment. The feeling that you are enough and that you have enough. Perhaps it’s gratitude that brings forward contentment. I’ll admit over the years I’ve struggled with the word gratitude. When I was little, I was constantly told to be grateful for what I had, which wasn’t that much. I found it hard to feel gratitude when I was eating dripping sandwiches for lunch every day while sitting with the other children who had banana sandwiches and chocolate biscuits in their lunchboxes. I believe it was the US President Theodore Roosevelt who said that comparison is the thief of joy. It’s certainly been a journey for me to stop comparing in order to find gratitude in what I had, in who I was with, and even within myself. If we can start to be content with what we already have, and who we are as a unique person, then perhaps we can learn to be content within. Then we might all be happy.