Do you know what makes you happy?
In between shopping and working and groceries and that broken door handle and the workshop and … wait, what was the question?
If I asked you, “What annoys you?” I bet the answer comes speeding out of your mouth. But what makes you happy? Do you know?
I’m just going to focus on one thing, so I remember it, so I record it, so it won’t go away.
The photo in this post is a collection of my son’s friends’ bikes parked in our driveway.
That is what makes me incredibly, deeply, and tears-in-my-eyes happy.
He has friends. They come over, they stop by, they invite him to the lake. They play iPad, the eat (all of our) popcorn and they’re huge fans of what they called the “Mexicaanse Tosti” (which is really a quesadilla, but they don’t know that word so they call it a Mexican grilled cheese sandwich.
He has friends. They have bikes. They come over to play. He goes to their houses (which he bikes to). He has independence. He’s growing up. I’m here to witness it.
That’s what makes me happy.
What makes you happy?
After I hit publish on this post, I thought, “Well, sure, a million dollars or a best-selling novel, or a ___________ would make me happy, too.” But then it dawned on me that those things don’t “make” you happy. Things can’t make us happy. We are happy (or we are not happy) and “things” tear open the sash and let us peek into who we are. Those things don’t bring up those fizzy bubbles from my gut into my throat and tears in my eyes to the point where I say inside my head, “This is why I’m alive.”
