Do People Know When They Are Having Their Best Day?

I hear people make the comment, “this is the happiest day of my life”, but I wonder if that is just something they say. I suspect that the days that people look back on as the happiest will often have gone unremarked upon at the time; probably because they were too focused on something better that they hoped would happen in the future. It could be that these happy days are only ever acknowledged in retrospect and that is a real shame.

Reasons to be Cheerful Now

There are so many good things in my life at the moment. The problem is that too much of my thinking is devoted to the things I’d like to have. I’m never really satisfied because of an inner compulsion to keep moving the goal posts; the life that will really make me happy is always over the next hill. John Lennon described the situation perfectly when he lamented that, life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans – he got that one right for sure.

When I examine my current situation there is not much to complain about. Amazingly the Bangkok floods seem to have missed our house, and things are going well with work. I’ve got a wonderful wife, and my son is still at that golden age where almost everything he does is cute. This really could be as good as it gets and there is no shame in that. When I gave up my alcohol addiction five and a half years ago I never expected any of this; just not waking up every day feeling like shit would have been enough for me then.

If these are the best days of my life then I jolly well better get my act together and appreciate them a bit more. It is just hard to avoid being mentally sucked into the future. Meditation helps a lot but even with this I can be striving to reach some goal in the future. The only thing I have is now so to keep on pushing it away is just mental.