Happiness for Beginners

by Katherine Center

Was I overwhelming? Or too emotional? Or too needy? I’d never thought of myself that way before, but I guess who you are always seems normal to you because you don’t know what it feels like to be anyone else.

I decided I wasn’t a huge fan of college kids. They were far too confident for my taste—far too proud of themselves. They were the Self-Esteem Generation, and they were all awesome. Where was the doubt? The angst? The self-hatred?

Certain people in life—and not even always ones who deserve it—can just unlock all your doors, somehow. Even if you change the locks or hide the keys.

happy people are more likely to register joy than unhappy people. So if you take two people who have experienced a day of, say, fifty percent good things and fifty percent bad things, an unhappy person would remember more of the bad.” “Kind of that glass-half-empty thing.” “But it’s not just attitude. It’s genuinely connected to memory. It’s like, for unhappy people, if you ask them at the end of the day what they remember, it’s the bad stuff. But they aren’t ignoring the good memories, they just didn’t retain them.”

“The more you register good things,” she went on, “the more you will think about and remember good things. And since all you really have left of the past is what you remember—” “It changes the story of your life.”

Trying, I was good at. Even if succeeding was a different story.

“The things you think about determine the things you think about”—meaning the more you focus on something, the more likely your brain is to focus on it.

“He said, ‘Think of somebody who loved you. Or loves you. Somebody who is rooting for you. Who believes in you. Who would be willing to suffer for you.’” “Beckett said that?” Jake nodded. “He said that there will come a day when things are so hopeless that the only way we’ll get through will be to turn to our person, whoever it is, in our heads—so we can draw strength from them to keep going.”

The most important thing to remember is that getting what you want doesn’t make you happy.” “It doesn’t?” I asked. “Not for long. Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.”

“I gave you Jake because you’re headstrong and accident prone, and he’s our medic and I trust him to patch you up. I gave you Jake because you’re the best map reader we’ve got, and he’s damn near blind. And I gave you Jake because you absolutely never believe in yourself—and he finds a way to believe in you every damn day.”

But it was an overly loud, overly boisterous strategy: staving off sadness by insisting you didn’t care.

I would certainly never come back—but not because I’d never want to. Only because that’s how life is. It moves too fast—faster and faster the older you get, no matter how much you’d like to slow it down.

I had finally come to understand that not getting what you want is actually the trick to it all. Because not getting what you want forces you to appreciate what you already have. I finally got that if you were always in a state of longing you could never truly get satisfied,

Life is going to knock you down over and over, I reminded myself, and the best you can do is learn to get back up.

“Why didn’t you ever point this out before?” She shook her head. “You can’t tell people their lives.” I shut my eyes. “Because they have to figure it out themselves.”

He taught you something. He taught you how to let somebody love you a little bit. That lesson right there is enough to change your life.”

“Is there any story in the world that can be told in two sentences?”

But the things we remember are what we hold on to, and what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives. We only get one story. And I am determined to make mine a good one.

Good things are so easy to overlook, but that doesn’t make them any less there.