Choose to Be Happy Now!

Nothing is holding you from being happy right now:

Don’t Let Anything Bar Your Own Personal Happiness

What is truly preventing ourselves from being happy?

Often we bar our own personal happiness. We hold onto malice and feelings of resentment towards others. Or we are prisoners to our own past.

The first step is this:

Don’t let yourself get in your own way of your own personal happiness.

I once read, “Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.”

We have the power to NOT resent others, and we have the power to NOT resent our own personal past.


Lack of possessions isn’t holding back your personal happiness

Processed Fujifilm GFX 50R File

This is also something that took me a long time to learn and realize:

Not having certain possessions, tools, or stuff isn’t holding me back from being happy.

Of course there are certain tools and equipment which are advantageous to our life, which makes our lives more convenient, productive, etc. Yet, this is what I discovered after obtaining all the equipment/tools/toys I wanted:

I’m not happier having all the equipment and tools I desire. I might be more productive, but not ‘happier’.

Thus this is my realization:

Tools are advantageous for us, but are insignificant to contribute to our own personal happiness.

Where does personal happiness come from?

This is what I think personal happiness is:

  1. Having strong vitality and vigor: The feeling we have when we have slept enough the night before, the feeling of having energy and vigor to embark on productive/creative work, and also the feeling we have when we are calm and focused.
  2. The feeling of freedom and control over your life: The feeling that you can control the hours of your day, the feeling that nobody is preventing you from embarking on your own creative work. The power of control that you can control the tempo of your day. The feeling that you don’t have any gate-keepers preventing you from publishing your work (the benefit of owning your own blog, to publish according to your own terms, without an editor).
  3. Elevated mood: Elevated mood from being surrounded by other human beings (I generally prefer to do creative work at coffee shops, being surrounded by interesting strangers), from sunlight, from the ability to walk around (not feeling cooped up at home), the feeling that you are looking forward to creating new art-works, the feeling that the best is yet to come.

Choose to be happy today!

You have the power to be happy today. As Horace teaches us,

Put as little faith in the unknown tomorrow.

In some ways, hope is dope (optimism is good). Yet, sometimes we become slaves to hope (hoping for something unknown prevents us from being happy today).

Let us seek to be happy today as photographers! Let us shoot today, and let us leverage the maximum benefits of today, and keep an elated smile on our faces.

Smile :)

ERIC