Don’t worry, be happy now

Happy new year, right? Well, hopefully happier anyway…

I’ve been thinking about happiness these past few weeks, because I haven’t been feeling terribly thrilled with life. No particular reason other than the usual First World problems and general malaise while sitting middle-aged atop a heap of youth’s broken dreams – and it’s also likely that living through a tedious pandemic is taking its toll.

It still beats the alternative though. And yet everything feels difficult at the moment, particularly enjoyment.

I fear I’m becoming bitter, dissatisfied, a malcontent. So I try really hard at happiness, faking it till I can make it, smiling brightly, laughing loudly, but I still don’t always get there.

Is it just me? Does this sound at all familiar?

And so the turn of the year necessitated a looking back over the past 12 months to discover when I was happiest. The answer surprised me.

It wasn’t reading a fabulous book, or putting the full stop at the end of a particularly satisfying passage of writing, or working on my art college projects, or uncorking that hoarded bottle of vintage Dom Perignon, or unwrapping a long-coveted handbag on my birthday, or walks with my dog, or conversations with the garden robin, or cosy dinners with my family, or biting into a perfect pastel de nata, or watching the moon rising or the sun setting, or even the arrival of my mum and sister for Christmas – undeniably wonderful as all those things were.

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Instead, my happiest time was those months when I was stood unpaid on aching feet for six hours at a time, directing queues in a mass vaccination centre. I volunteered from March until we closed, job done, in September.

I met people I’d never usually meet, had surprising conversations and felt myself to be a tiny, yet efficient, cog in a larger machine, working towards a greater purpose.

Yes, the shifts could be hard but they were not thankless. I was purposeful, useful – and I felt alive; so alive.

I wasn’t the only one: several of my colleagues admitted our work had literally saved their sanity. What we were doing mattered and that’s what made us happy.

So, instead of a happy new year I wish you a meaningful, purpose-filled one, for that is where happiness is truly found.

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