Awareness of happiness

This is my first blog entry, so I'm quite excited! Actually, I've been thinking on and off about creating a blog for a while, but somehow I've never quite got around to it. It's the same with diaries, I've kept one sporadically for years and years, but always in short bursts of emotion and then forgot about keeping it up.

Which brings me onto the title I decided to give my blog spot. I've had lots of conversations lately with some of my closest friends about the subject of happiness. Human beings have an amazing ability to adjust and adapt - which is brought home to us when we see photos of starving children in Africa able to smile and laugh, and when we see people picking up their lives again after disasters like tsunamis and severe flooding. It's significant that we can put the latest news on Paris Hilton and Britany Spears alongside news articles about deaths in attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, next to murder trials in the UK. But perhaps this is a blessing.

What is more sad is that we also fail to recognise happiness when we experience it. Have you ever been told to 'count your blessings' as a child? But I always found that rather than making me happy and grateful, often I just felt guilty and vaguely resentful (I could be a rather DIFFICULT child). But do most people only realise that they were HAPPY at a particular point in time respectively? Maybe we should stand back and take stock, before the music stops and it's too late.

I've been lucky enough to experience happiness and known that I was happy at the time, without alloying it with fears. This was in the fifth year of my relationship with my (now-ex) boyfriend. Why only in the fifth year I wonder? Considering it now, I realise that I'd always held back a little of myself from our relationship. I loved him a lot, but I wasn't able to put all my hopes and confidence into any relationship. Confidence in him, or in myself? I'm still not sure. But then for some reason, without discussing it but both at the same time, we decided to try letting go of all our fears, to free-fall into our relationship and not worry or even care about what came next. And that was the most amazing, most perfectly happy, summer in my life. Even more so than any in my happy childhood (I was much-loved) because then, I took it all for granted in the way only children who have never know anything else do.

Not long after that, my boyfriend, who is Malaysian Chinese but worked in the UK, decided to move back to Malaysia and try and build his future there. Our new-found confidence in ourselves and each other meant that we thought it would work. Unfortunately, as he's now my ex-boyfriend, it didn't. This was the very scenerio I had been afraid of and part of the reason why I had always held back from loving him completely. But strangely, although the heartache was immense (and I never knew before that you can really feel your heart break), I'm still glad that I've experienced this love that ultimately caused me so much pain.

I think most people are afraid of loving too deeply, of trusting too much, because then we lay ourselves and our hearts open to hurt. But at the same time we are attracted to people who are loving and open. A few of my friends are like that, they love deeply and are hurt often as a consequence, but they are emotionally so enriched. Not to say that everyone should or can be like that, because with deep happiness comes deep sadness and pain, but I love them for being so.

Well, that's a dramatically long-winded explanation of why I've chosen my blog title! But I believe to be aware of happiness is a real blessing, and one that is difficult to cultivate. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could cultivate this awareness though, and set it growing in everyone's minds?