Letters to Winter | Happiness

 Dear Winter,

Recently, a friend was doing a project on happiness, and she asked me what happiness meant to me.  I said, "Being happy is having a healthy range of emotions. It's not just not being sad, it's being everything. And being okay with being everything." She laughed, and I realized how much I sounded like a therapist. She then told me that most people said "laughing", "having fun", "not worrying","friends and family" or things like that.

I think that some people's idea of happiness is distorted. Happiness isn't a permanent state. You can't be happy all the time. There has to be space for excitement, anxiety, sadness, anger, and everything in between. To quote one of my favorite bands, "Without the bitter, the sweet isn't as sweet." Without night, we wouldn't learn to appreciate day. Without the cold, we wouldn't appreciate the warmness of our beds.

In other words, happiness and sadness are like the yin and yang. Without one, the other would not exist. While I enjoy the days full of excitement and the outdoors and socializing, I also enjoy a day like today every once in a while; a day when I sit in bed all day, in my pajamas, watching youtube videos.

Happiness is not only being happy. Happiness is to get through sadness and learn to enjoy it and make the best out of it.