A healthy approach to life
coming to fruition as I type.
This idea does not promote hedonism. Rather it suggests that you live for what you have and you enjoy it as it is and as you change it as opposed to chasing ideas and ideals and goals. Goals are wonderful things to have, but if you you go after them and sacrifice what you have, you might just as well end up with a pyrrhic victory.
This goes against the idea that happiness is a pursuit, a capricious thing to be caught and trapped, that it is a big package that will fall out of the sky if you are lucky enough. Happiness is something you live bit by bit. It trickles to you like a small stream if you have dug a river bed for it, and you eventually reach the delta. The time you spend "looking" for happiness is time you could have spent finding, realizing, and accepting it in others, in your studies, in retrospection, and in what you already are.
Happiness comes to those who openly welcome it within. Being happy is not being on e: it is living in reality with a positive and realistic (but not necessarily cynical) approach to it. You accept yourself and others, faults and all, and you realize your ability to change yourself and influence others.
Don't be what Pink Floyd once sang: "and one day you find/ ten years are left behind you/ no one told you when to run/ you missed the starting gun".
happy != perky
happy != deluded or delusional
Sometimes you just have to grin and bear it and find out you enjoy it no matter how much you don't want to enjoy it. Oftentimes happiness is not a state of mind until you or someone close to you is jeopardized. Don't wait. Live for today. Tomorrow might keep you alive, but there is only one tomorrow and scores of yesterdays. Choose which one you want to make memorable. Make your plans today and never hold off.