A Happy Heart can also be a Sad Heart

Holey Happy Heart by Shannan Tyndall

I think my brother got too caught up in chasing the idea of happy rather than just stopping to be happy. He never understood what contentment was and thought “things” would produce his happy. He was too focused on chasing the white rabbit that he never noticed the grey, black and brown rabbits surrounding him.

If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I was “happy” I’m not sure I would have known how to answer. Even though I was well into my thirties I was still finding my path in life. I was still getting to know myself and still working on my relationship with myself. I was successful in some areas in my life and not so much in others. I really wasn’t sure what I wanted out of life. But I was having a lot of fun.

If you would have asked me 5 years ago I would have said I was happy. I had an incredible partner, a healthy and smart two year old and we were building a life together. I was now adjusting to getting to know this new “mom/wife” me but in my core I was happy.

If you ask me today if I am happy I would not hesitate to say that I am. I still have my incredible partner by my side, and our now seven year old is still healthy and smart. (When I say “smart” I mean book smart, he is a seven year old boy and they inherently do “not  smart” things on an hourly basis). I’ve worked really hard to get to know and be comfortable and confident in my mom/wife role and more importantly I’ve worked on balancing all of the Shannans; mom, wife, friend, daughter, sister, dog mom, aunt, etc.

I would expand my answer if you asked me today and tell you that not only is my heart and soul happy but I am also content. If you asked me what I wanted out of life I would tell you: this. My life right now if what I want out of life. I am fully aware that I am living the best years of my life right now and you can be damn sure I am taking as much time as I want to slow down and enjoy ALL of the moments.

But just because I am happy and content does not mean I can’t also be sad. I’m not sad all of the time these days but there is still a lot of sad left in me. And that’s ok. My sad does not change my happy, content status. I don’t feel I need a change in my life to get rid of the sad. The sad can stay, I need to feel the sad, to experience the sad and know it can coexist with my happy and contentment.

We go through seasons in our life. Even in my happy, content life there are many seasons. But they are just that, seasons. And we all know seasons come and go, you just have to be patient and the difficult seasons will pass just as the great seasons won’t last forever. I just have to remember that regardless of the season my garden of happy and contentment is still there and I can harvest its fruit whenever I want or need to.

My happy does not come from what surrounds me, it comes from within me. My content comes from knowing that my happy does not depend on what surrounds me.

I think that in this era of “you do you”, instant gratification and fake social “influencers” it is easy to be misguided. Everyone and everything around us is telling us what we “need” to make us happy but the truth is we don’t “need” anything.

I know what I am saying comes from a place of privilege, but also keep in mind that I spend 35+ years working on myself and getting to know myself before I committed to my partner and started a family. It takes a lot of work to figure out who you are and to find out what fertilizer to use in your happy garden.

I did have this conversation with Chris a few times but I never circled back to make sure he really got it. He didn’t. He said he did but he didn’t. Or maybe he thought he did but he didn’t really understand.  He never knew happy hearts can still be sad.