What Does Happiness Look Like?

Don't shade your eyes from the bright joy of the world.

Terri Guillemets

Good morning. What a gorgeous springlike day it was yesterday.  I was tempted to go straight to the beauty parlor after the Center and have my hair chopped.  It has gotten so long.  Seems like one of my medications has generated a flourish of rapid hair growth, and it reaches all the way down my back again.  Remember, it was only two years ago that I had it chopped up to my ears.  My hair has never grown so fast, and I am wondering if it has something to do with my thyroid medication.  In fact, just prior to my last haircut, it took me almost six years to grow it that long.

I've decided to wait, though, until the weather is warmer.  Short hair, for me, has always been more difficult to deal with.  That is because one side is straight and the other wavy.  Hence, I wash it at least every three days so I can keep it styled...and I love to wash my hair in my morning shower. I can't do that when it is cold.  

So, yesterday's Daily Prompt was: Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy, and the question was....

....What does 'happiness' look like to you?

Had someone asked me the above question before I retired, I would have said 'I don't know'.  And that would have been the truth. I was terribly unhappy during my last few years at work. If you hate your job, it's very difficult to find happiness. Yes, we did have our laughs, but that's all they were--laughs. But true happiness is really so much more than having a few laughs for  soon as the laughter was over, we all went back to being our miserable selves.

According to Merriam Webster happiness is 'the state of being happy'.  When I go to the Center, I see so many that state every day, and, as the youngest there, it gives me so much hope that life will continue to get better and better. It is so easy to see that these seniors love life and everything it has to offer. They savor every moment of it. They laugh, they share, they dance, they go out to dinner, and enjoy participating in all the activities. All one has to do is look around the lunch room at all the happy faces, the twinkling in the eyes,  and the joyous spirit that abounds, and one cannot help but to feel at peace.  Happiness is being happy just being alive.

When you're really happy, the birds chirp and the sun shines even on cold dark winter nights — and flowers will bloom on a barren land. 

Terri Guillemets

If the day and night be such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more immortal - that is your success.  All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. 

Henry David Thoreau,