Happy for No Reason?

Half my weekend was eaten up by a team building activity for work.  It wasn't bad, but it was still work.  On a Friday.  And a Saturday.  In the summer.  Needless to say I don't have much to report for the remainder of the weekend since it only really consisted of ONE day.  The hubs and I spent some quality time together though, so I was grateful for that!

Monnnnths ago, when I wasn't going through the easiest time in my life, a friend signed me up for an email called The Daily Love.  I'm not gonna lie, at first I was a little skeptical, sorry friend.  But since then I look forward to these emails and the messages they convey and the way they really make me think.  Every morning when I'm getting ready, the email rolls in and I read the quotes at the top right away.  There's always at least one great one.  I copy and paste it and send it to a friend in a text, usually accompanied with a heart (I'm a softie, don't tell anyone).

Well, the other day a quote came through that I haven't been able to stop thinking about...

“When you’re Happy for No Reason, you bring happiness to your outer experiences rather than trying to extract happiness from them. You don’t need to manipulate the world around you to try to make yourself happy. You live from happiness, rather than for happiness.”

- Marci Shimoff, author of Happy for No Reason

I've mentioned before that in the past I've been pretty fucking unhappy.  I had this misconception that I needed to find something that would make me happy.  I thought for sure that new friends would make me happy!  A puppy would make me happy!  Buying stuff would make me happy!  Well, I was wrong.  None of that made me happy.  I needed to be happy enough to enjoy all of those "things" and to be present in those relationships.

Having been there before I feel myself slipping back into that mentality.  I'm not unhappy, by any means, but I do feel like I could be happiER.  And once again, I find myself realizing that I can't use other events, other people or other things to make me happy.  Daniel Tosh, philosophical mastermind, jokes that:  “Money doesn’t buy happiness.” Uh, do you live in America? ‘Cause it buys a WaveRunner. Have you ever seen a sad person on a WaveRunner? Have you? Seriously, have you? Try to frown on a WaveRunner. You can’t!”

So, since I won't be testing the wave runner theory anytime soon, I'm gonna need to figure this out.  How'd I stop worrying and start living a little the last time around?  How'd I stop stressing about every little thing and go days where I couldn't stop smiling?

Have you figured out the reason that you're happy for no reason?