Be Happy

I spent the morning out hiking around in the woods.  The weather has let up for at least the moment, and it felt good to be out of the house.  I enjoy being alone, surrounded by nature.  The repetitive plodding of my boots on the muddy ground.  My mind is allowed to wander.  I spend a lot of time alone now, a lot of time thinking.  I’m still not for sure what my plan is, what path I will choose to follow.  I know I plan to spend my time wisely, frugally, and enjoyably. 

Even though I think about the past less and less, I still think about it from time to time.  I wonder how things might be different.  I guess that’s something we all do.  There are things that I miss about my pre-Hawaii life, but overwhelmingly, I am glad things have turned out the way they have.  Everyday, there is one reassuring factor, one thing that quiets any doubts; I am happy.  I am happier than I ever have been.

It’s still very early in my journey, so it may be presumptious of me to give advice to others, but I want to let you know, being happy is awesome, it’s worth it.  I understand that I have advantages that many people may not have.  For one, Leanna is willing to support me while I figure things out.  Some of you may not have that support, and some of you may be supporting others.  It’s hard for me to put myself in your situation, especially since you could be anybody.  My audience is all of you out there who are generally unhappy with the way things are going.  Some of you will be old, many of you young.  Some of you will be rich, others poor, or just getting by.  You have to make it work for you. 

I know that I sat behind that desk for three and a half years, and not all days were bad, some were even good, but there were enough awful days to make things miserable.  And for some of you, work might not even be the issue, but I think you can apply these general principles to many situations.  First, you have to be able to admit that you are not happy.  Do you like the things you are doing?  Does looking five years down the road excite you, bore you, terrify you?  Once you understand that you are not happy, you need to find out why.  For me, that was work.  I could never really pinpoint exactly why I felt my job was so dreadful, I just knew that I didn’t like it.  And though I didn’t like it, I felt it was necessary.  I would count the hours I spent at work, pit them against the hours I spent away from work, and try to assign each hour a value on my personal happiness scale.  My goal became to maximize the average value, to get the most happiness possible.  I never actually put pencil to paper for this exercise, but the theory behind it is what finally drove me to quit my job.  I had to reassess what made the highest value hours so high, and understand that I didn’t necessarily have to put in the lowest hours to get my highest ones.  And even if I can no longer attain the maximum hourly value, a notion I disregard, I realized the average had to go up if I removed 40 low hours a week.

I came to these conclusions months before I actually quit my job.  Having this idea, this theory, is one thing, but putting it in to practice is something different all together.  Quitting my job was scary.  I kept telling myself that I needed an exit strategy, and truthfully, my exit could have been a bit more graceful.  The problem for me was, that I could never come up with something I wanted to do.  I had never had to answer that question before.  I was supposed to be civil engineer, I never asked myself what I wanted to be.   And still, I am unsure.  Hawaii was a catalyst.  I needed help, a push if you will, to make that leap of faith.  I encourage any of you who find yourself in similar circumstances to seriously take a look around.  Find out why it is that you are so unhappy, and even if you are not entirely sure of what it is you want to do, that doesn’t mean you can’t stop doing those things that you don’t want to, or at the very least mitigate them.

Like I said earlier, I understand that not everyone can just quit their job, not everyone has someone to depend on, someone to shoulder their financial burden for awhile.  I understand that money makes that world go round, that we need money to provide ourselves food and shelter.  It is likely impossible for many of you to enact such a drastic and radical change, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take small steps.  It doesn’t mean you can’t work towards it.  Society tells us that things must be just so, that as Americans, this is the way you must live your life.  Those are lies, you can do what you want, as long as what you want is within reason.  Stop caring so much about what you need to do, what you are supposed to do; and start focusing on what you want to do, what makes you happy.

Ryan