Happiness depends on where our attention is focused. A metaphor: an apartment block with no power, and one flat with solar panels.
I once heard that most people are exactly as happy as they have decided to be.
At first glance it seems that in the middle of a full-scale war, with the blackouts back, an economic downturn and other “black swans”, even talking about happiness is a kind of mockery.
But I keep noticing an interesting pattern. The people who were happy before Covid and before February 24 are still in the same good spirits today. And those who were unhappy before all of it are just as sad now.
I believe a person’s happiness depends on inner conditions. Although, of course, external events play their part too.
Picture it as an apartment block with 100 flats where the power has been cut off.
But one resident has solar panels installed on his balcony and windows, and a Starlink terminal.
While the whole building sits in darkness, that particular flat is warm, it has light, internet and hot water.
In the other 99 flats it is gloomy and sad, but if you walk into that one flat with the solar panels during a blackout, your mood may lift, and you might even find the strength to get on with your own work.
Our life is like that apartment block. There are always flats where we feel good, and there are always entire floors wrapped in darkness and cold.
It is up to us which flat we choose to live in.
If we want to find reasons to be unhappy, we will find them easily: family problems, corruption in the country, the war, money troubles, power cuts and so on. The list is endless and unique for each of us.
But if we set ourselves the task of finding the good things in our life, we will just as easily find plenty of reasons to be happy.
The life we live depends on where our attention is focused. Are we in that one flat with the light, or in one of the 99 flats in the dark?
We can look for the things we are grateful for and the things that are beautiful in our life — or we can find a hundred reasons to feel crushed and broken.
When I start feeling low, I remind myself that 750 million people in this world have no access to clean drinking water, and that my problems, compared to that, are nothing at all.
Can you stay happy no matter what?
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