Whatever makes you happy.....

I asked my son to do a job for me today ( this is not so…unusual, in fact asking is what I do most, repeatedly) and he said ‘Ok Mum, whatever makes you happy”……and I thought, well, actually doing something WHEN I ask you (and not three asks and three days later,) would make me happy, putting the lid on the toothpaste would make me happy, washing your breakfast dishes when you have used them would make me happy, keeping your room tidy would make me happy…..etc. etc.

Oh yes and while on the subject of whatever makes me happy I‘d like to mention, chocolate that doesn’t go straight to the waist and thighs, no such thing as menopause, a body temperature that stays the same and is predictable….emotions that stay the same and are predictable….( no more unnatural outbursts of tears at odd moments and tantrums over ridiculously important things like crumbs on the table or missing a favourite TV show, tantrums that make me forever guilty because I have not been the essential wife or mother)….sunshine ( that I can actually access because I haven’t got work to do on the computer,) family get togethers, the ocean, the puppy ( oddly, even when he is trying to chew up the lounge carpet or pulling at the legs of my pajamas??), the kids just because they are so beautiful and individual and I have survived not only their birth but all the attendant dramas of growing them up!! And finally , my husband…who probably doesn’t know that he makes me happy, because of my menopausal tantrums, fears and tears….but who does make me happy, when he smiles at me, when he puts his strong arms around me, when takes the tiny puppy for a walk and talks to it like it were a child…when he puts his dark glasses on and looks like a movie star, when he laughs in his sleep, when he puts up with a crazy old lady and insists he loves her, despite the fact she has just berated him for half an hour over the exact meaning behind some remark he has made unwittingly…and expects him to know how to ‘be there for her’ when she finds it hard to know how to comfort him while he is going through his ‘stuff’….oh well.

I could give a lengthy dissertation on the nature of happiness here (I am good at lengthy dissertations), but it’s just really an unquantifiable feeling that is good. It makes you all warm and fuzzy inside…OH MY GOD, perhaps happiness is…menopause!!!!
Truth though, (it is not menopause, oh yes, most definitively not menopause, except for losing the monthly’s) but it is a good wholesome kinda feeling and there should be more of it……

"When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter." Albert Camus

"Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others." His Holiness the DAlai Lama

"There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness." Carl Jung

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony" Ghandi