Happiness

I have not written in a while as maybe some of you have noticed, so sorry. My goal is to write every 2 weeks. I’ll see if I can pick up the pace in the coming weeks. The sad part is is that I had this written for a while, but could not post it because of the slow internet.

Work has been the same good old stuff I talked about in the last entry. The one new big thing that occurred down here recently was the 4^th of July, for which all the volunteers got together and had a big celebration with dancing, American food and beer, and even a talent show. It’s not the same as going down to South Haven or staying at Aunt Carol’s at White Fish Lake, but I have to say I still had a lot of fun. When the party was over, we celebrated even more in Antigua, where places had more 4^th of July celebrations with some even having cakes and a piñata of Uncle Sam.

So besides that and my new battle with hopefully just a few fleas in my room, (I just recently found 3 while reading in my chair; I am pretty sure I am bringing them with me from Sabanetas. I was hoping cleaning and mopping weekly would be sufficient, but I guess not. Either way, I am waging an entire campaign now to stop them while they are just starting. After a long day of cleaning, last night, I had no fleas bother me… I slept in just my sleeping bag, but still, I had no fleas bother me.) the only other thing I wanted to write about was something that I think I am starting to learn more about, what it means to be happy. It is nothing new, but just something refreshed and more firmly founded. We all say that happiness cannot be bought, and I think I and many other believe it or think we believe it. I know though, that there are many actions of mine that correspond to something else, something that says, “You can buy something to improve your conditions by gaining more comfort, extra time, more pleasure or whatever, and that these gains will bring you happiness.” For instance, when I have a hard day, I look for my trail mix and dried cranberries to cheer me up. While it might cheer me up, eating them certainly will not cheer up everyone and the cranberries and trail mix are not actually causing happiness in themselves; there are other underlying reasons. When I moved to San Carlos, I became excited to just have a door to my room, to bathe in cold water that came from a shower spigot, and to be able to eat 4 eggs a day. Coming from my aldea, it was certainly an improvement and would seem to follow the old rule I wrote that happiness can be bought. Probably at first this was my natural programmed reaction that having something better corresponds to being happier, but soon after I began to think, “Why am I happy to have 4 eggs a day or a door or a shower spigot?” If I were in the US, would these things give me some happiness? The answer would most likely be no, especially in the case of the eggs which would probably make me grouch at what I were eating. So I asked then, “What is the difference?” Well the obvious difference is that here I am ‘moving up’ and from the US, it would be a move downward. The more subtle difference though is that my perspective has changed. I learned be more happy with fewer things; I was more grateful for the tiny things that I had so easily just taken for granted. So basically, I feel like happiness can be obtained through practice and a conscious effort. If I train myself or learn to be happy when I get something new, why can’t I train myself or learn to be happy with what I have, both concrete things and things like friendship, family, etc. If I make an effort to be more conscious of these seemingly little things I get each day, I will be over flooded. Ordinary days become good days and hard days become something not so hard to bear.