Happy Moments

Have you ever had a moment where everything in life just seemed good? When there were no big worries pressing down on you and in that exact moment you were simply lifted up and happy?

I still remember one of those moments I had when I was about twenty. I was working at a small amusement park that curves around a lake with a view of mountains in the background. It was a mid-summer day, maybe just after it had rained and everything had cooled down for the night. And I’m pretty sure the sun was setting along the mountains, painting the sky shades of pink and purple and orange.

I was out doing my rounds, checking on my cashiers, walking through the park before it got busy. And in that exact moment I felt right with the world. Buoyed up with the pleasure of the moment.

It wasn’t a big moment. I wasn’t in love. I didn’t have lots of money. I was living in a teeny little apartment or with my grandma. I was driving a clunker of a car or some really cheap new car that wouldn’t drive well through those mountains in the distance. I was earning more than minimum wage, but not much. I knew that job wasn’t my long-term career and that I’d have to strike out and find something else.

But that moment was a moment of pure enjoyment and being right with the world.

It seems to me people are often searching for happiness in the big moments. The wedding. The birth of a kid. The first kiss.

And those moments are often good moments, but they’re also ones that carry this heavy weight of pressure around them. (How anyone survives the stresses of their wedding day without a complete meltdown, I don’t know.)

For me it’s always the quieter, smaller moments that are the moments of pure joy.

Like with skydiving, it was never the moment you leave the plane that was the best for me, it was hanging there under canopy with all the stillness and peace and just looking around. (At the lake spread out nearby and mountains in the distance. I may in fact have a thing for lakes and mountains. Haha.)

Anyway. Something to think about. We don’t always need the big moments to be happy if we can pause and capture the small ones instead.