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I thought I was going to be blogging today about looking at your life and picking out events and choices and experiences that directly (or indirectly) led to your current level of happiness. I was going to blog about how we could actively choose to be happy, or make active choices that would ultimately lead to happiness.
But, a funny thing happened on the way to that post.
I woke up one day last week, to what I thought was going to be just a normal day. A day of good things and not so good things. Ordinary things and frustrating things. Nothing that would really change my level of happiness. But something random, out of the blue, did happen and that thing ... it changed everything. My happiness level skyrocketed. If I were a different sort of person, I might even have been heard to say "this was the happiest day of my life" or even "this was one of the happiest days of my life" because that is what people seem to say when really amazing stuff happens.
Have you said it? "This is the happiest day of my life!" or "That was the happiest moment of my life!" or "This has been the happiest experience of my life!"
Most people seem to have said it or they can easily come up with several "happiest" days.
I tweeted "What was the happiest day of your life?" and I got no @replies. I got a lot of DM'd replies and since they were DMs I'll just tell you that they ranged from quitting a job I hated to the birth of my first child. There were some other really, really personal happiest days and I'm not going to mention them here because they're very private but I can say they were in fact truly happy days because they were so incredibly life changing - life changing in ways that you and I and the average human being will never understand. Those types of "happiest days" I can understand. But, I'm not someone who has ever been so incredibly unhappy that one event could change my life that way. (And I do realize just how lucky that makes me.)
I took the question of "happiest day" to another level on Facebook and asked about the "best day of your life" and whether "best days" are automatically "happiest days". I got some interesting responses.
Deb Roby said "happy comes easy, best is harder". My LYS friend Sharon talked a lot about how she can have a "happiest day" even when things don't go perfectly - best days are when everything does go perfectly, happy days are happy for other reasons.
I understand what Sharon means. I've been really, super happy for no reason I could actually point at and say "That! That is making me so darn happy I could burst!" Sometimes happy just cannot be explained.
I talked to TW and this and she described... the time it was just a normal day in Anderson and we were driving home from Waffle House. Holding hands in the car. Not really doing anything special, just having a normal day.
She remembers telling herself that she wanted to remember everything about that day because she was really happy. Huh. I have no idea what day that was, it doesn't stand out for me - but I understand it. Happy just hits you.
There are a lot of people who call their wedding days or the births of their children the "happiest days" of their lives. I'll post some links to those stories here, but I recommend you Google "happiest day of my life" just so you can get an idea of how often people talk about this. It makes for an interesting way to spend your day - pondering your own "happiest days" or the fact that, if you're like me, you don't seem to have "happiest days". I have great days but not "happiest" days.
In one of the twitter private conversations I had about happiest days, someone said there is something inherently wrong with trying to label these types of experiences as "the happiest" and I agree with that wholeheartedly.
Let's not also forget that our happiest experiences often occur in the midst of a whole lot of angst, pain, confusion and crazy.
* Weddings - one of the most stressful events
