What are the essential ingredients of happiness?
Well interestingly, depending on where you are on the hierarchy of needs, if you're worried about survival and your surviving, you have a way to be happy with that. If you're more comfortable with your physical needs and your "in-belonging" and love and self esteem and you feel like those things are being met, you'll be happy there. So it depends on where you are in terms of taking a step beyond where ever you began and growing beyond the generation previously, to see how far you believe you need to go in order to reach the goal that you established, and again, meet your own expectations and you will feel happy as of result of that. I have a story for you, it was something I actually read on the internet one time and it was a story about a woman who was entering a nursing home who was completely blind, and as she entered the nursing home the aid that was taking her to her room, showed her her room and was sort of walking around helping her - say, you know "this is where the bed is" and "this is where the nightstand is" and the woman kept talking about how beautiful it was, and the aid asked her, "well, you know, I don't want to be disrespectful but, why do you think it's beautiful? I mean, frankly you can't really see.", and she said "I've already decided it was going to be beautiful in my mind and that's all that matters." And I think there's truth there because it really isn't about what is, its about what you believe there is, and theres a line I heard once, I think it's a Don Henley song which said that he wished not to have what he wanted but to want what he had, and I think thats it right there, is that you recongize that what you have is enough, that you establish a position of gratitude about what you have and that you look at that as being plenty and you look at yourself as being enough, and all of those things work synergistically to create joy and happiness within.
