How To Be Ferociously Happy: and other essays

by Dushka Zapata

I agonized over the Big Decisions until the day I realized big decisions were generally reversible and that it was the very small things that tended to have the most impact on the direction of my life.

I learned that things happen because they happen.

Expect miracles, but keep them non-specific so they can fill you with wonder. Or, be disappointed.

Figuring it out is another expression for the pursuit of happiness.

We are all trying to find ourselves.

Imagine a room within four brick walls. It’s comfortable and you have what you need. But it has no windows. This room is an ordinary life. Acceptable, but limited. Reading is like creating a window.

We don’t live in a terrible world. We live in a beautiful world where awful things happen.

Turns out nobody knows very much of anything.

And maybe that is the purpose of the stars. To make us look up and fill us with wonder.

Speaking a new language is about getting comfortable with the undeniable fact that you’re going to make a fool out of yourself and resolve to do it anyway.

Yay german learning

The Devil’s Dictionary,

Look for this

Today, when someone finds me boring all it means is we’re not a good match.

The best thing you can do for any relationship is establish one with yourself. Get to know the person that you are.

I cannot battle a thousand refracted shadows.

no matter what you do, you’re going to screw up your kids. (My hope is that you find this oddly liberating.)

You should pay attention to what people choose to tell you about themselves, because it’s usually true.

When you come across an obstacle, feel challenged instead of frustrated. It’s a matter of attitude/perspective.

I hate to break it to you, but things tend to work out fine without your intervention.

gratitude is the closest I have felt to God.

In my experience, we fight for two reasons: Projection (where you project onto the other person something you are feeling towards yourself). Expectations (when you are expecting something the other person has no idea about and therefore cannot meet it).

Resolving to be kind is a gift to yourself.

“Productivity” is more about generating something.

We can’t predict what we want, as it assumes we’re not going to change.

the most accurate way to live life is to go by what would be the best choice right now.

The busier you are working on you, your life and your happiness, the less time you will have to dwell on another’s success other than to celebrate it.

You can cheat death and ensure the person that you love lives forever if you carry his love inside and resolve to honor his life with your actions.

There is such magic in the world that your perspective will be more accurate if you blur the borders of what you currently consider possible.

Every time you do something you didn’t think you could you something shifts inside you.

We all need to work on loving ourselves instead of trying to decipher anyone’s feelings about anybody else, which is like emptying out the ocean with a teaspoon.

If you look hard enough for evidence you will find it even if it doesn’t exist.

If something doesn’t elate you, don’t stick with it. Life is short.

You want a better explanation. But that would be intellectual, and you are not your thoughts. You are their creator, and sometimes, for a glorious, lucid instant, their observer.

A lot of painful things will happen if you live. Live anyway.

the pursuit of your own happiness trumps what anyone may or may not be saying about you.

What someone says about you when they are unhappy with themselves is more about them than it is about you.

Have you ever noticed how beautiful someone (friend or lover) looks as you come to love them?

And that if someone doesn’t think you are beautiful you should go find all the people who do.

We obsess over what we fear to the point that we make it come true.

If you can create what you fear, you can create what you want.

Of all the books he wrote, my favorite is called An Anthropologist on Mars (I discovered it because I was visiting a friend’s house and the lights went out. The book had a glow in the dark cover so I walked right to it and pulled it off the shelf).

Forgiving someone is not a gift to the person who hurt you but rather a gift to yourself.

“And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

I don’t write about these things on social media because I want to highlight the good in my life. It’s the internet equivalent of smiling for the camera: you’re not being hypocritical; you want the photo to represent the moment in a way you’d want to remember it.

Go ahead and ask anyone about illness and loss and sorrow and misery. I guarantee no one escapes it.

But I do think it would be helpful for men to understand that a woman’s sense of vulnerability is different from theirs and that it is a part of our composition.

To this I say that if I find something that works for me, I don’t need to believe in it to use it.

Soul mates are not found. They are created.

I wonder how many things we are passing by that are supposed to be happening; what we are doing to the fabric of our fate by never looking up from our mobile devices.

People say “don’t be sad”. I learned to give my feelings the space they needed. I don’t understand why we are so afraid of feelings. Happy is OK, but sad has to be “addressed”. It must “move on”. It calls for a “solution”. But sad is not a problem.

It’s so shocking for a person to be there and then to not be there that it feels like everything they were will disappear.