[EDITED] Happiness...

Its been awhile since I last attended a household.

And so I went to Jollibee yesterday to meet up with the girls. It was fun seeing them again and being in a hh again! Last night, I was asked 3 questions during the HH, am I happy, healthy and holy. It seemed like it was an easy question, but looking closely, what does happiness really mean?

I wondered how my life have changed since I graduated college. How my perspective on things changed. Now that my life is on a standstill, what still made me happy?

On the course of the sharings, one of them said, 'Sana po masaya ako' I asked her why and she said: "hindi ko po alam pero sana po alam ko"

This conversation struck me, do we really just pretend to be happy or we look for reasons to at least be happy or are we really happy? How do we even know if we are happy? I couldn't answer for myself. I do not know how I feel about how I live my life. Yes, I could be happy in some aspects but I'm more frustrated that I can't seem to get my life on track. Am I really happy living my life in the shadows of the past and of fear. Am I merely looking for reasons to distract myself from the reality of how my life is currently? So am I really happy or at least pretending to? Its been weeks since I've had this feeling-- unsure of how I feel about my life. Unsure about many other things. What is happiness? Do we make it up in our head and tell people what they want to hear or are we truly happy that even the littlest things that we see in our lives makes us so?

We could always pretend that we are happy, we could always tell people that we are but then who are we fooling but ourselves, right? Since I've been feeling a lot of different emotions nowadays, I've realized that in order to be happy we have to recognize that we are not.

Happiness doesn't come with a formula. Theres no scale to even measure it up. We all have to go through the journey. Figure things out, eliminate all possible causes of pain and sorrow; cherish those that brings smile to our hearts. It may take a long time getting there, but once we have it, we will know. And it will be worth it.