Happiness 🤔

This is tricky; I actually do not know what to write about. To a point it feels like I have never been happy my entire life. I have been happy. I just need an icebreaker to try figure out what to write under this topic. The #30DayBlogChallenge has taken its toll on me and the first week is not yet even over. I thought it was going to be easy, but it is not easy at all! The creativity is there but creating the time to actually write all these stories is where the challenge is.

Happiness has been many things and it is probably the reason why I do not have a definition or a “secret” to it. Happiness is eating Chapati Ndengu maybe, it is also that extended road trip traversing Ukambani, Coast and Taita regions, it could be my weekly swim, it could be a flight to Narok… I feel like I want to complicate my way around these first two paragraphs until I find something that makes sense. I feel like a preacher who just lost his sermon notes. I was happy when I flew for the first time, I was also happy when I achieved a certain target I had set for myself. But on the contrary, that same aircraft that gave me so much pleasure is the same aircraft that became a source of so much frustration. You cannot talk about happiness and fail to mention sadness. They move together these two. There are days in the cockpit when you just want to let go of the struggle, hug yourself to bed, and decide you will not do it again.

I remember the first time, I disappointed myself because I was too slow to grasp some things – I cried that night 🙄– but I was still smiling I made it to the sky, ha! ha! Flying with your instructor is that bitter-sweet relationship most students dread. These were days, I looked forward to it. It was so good that I did not notice getting skinnier by the day (Compare this with someone who gets stressed over losing weight – I later got stressed about my losing weight). The chubby cheeks I had developed at Mombasa were sunken and my cheekbones stuck out. On one of those fine days on my 4^th circuit, I was trying so much to maintain a landing attitude but I could not, for some reason, I think I was still afraid of going back to the ground. I also think Air Crash Investigations made me paranoid and I always thought I would never make it to the runway, or I would be bumping so hard on the runway I would damage the plane. Therefore, that day I got a tongue-lashing of the ages. Then this became a routine. Every time I messed up, I had a rough time with my instructor. I remember one time I was so disappointed with myself that, I was on the edge of tears when I got home. It did not make sense that these things were not getting into my head. I mean all the time I had spent on the simulator was useless. It was not making me proud at all.

As I progressed on this journey, like in every other journey in life, I realized that I am not a perfect human being and there are times I would disappoint myself so bad that I did not think I would recover. However, this as I learnt was a process. It was a process of preparing me to become the best person that I could ever be one encounter at a time. With all the sweat and tears that come with it, I become an individual who is better every day. There is no way, I would be the same after every rough encounter. Some days, we can be so irritated at situations that we forget that in the general sense of things we are happy or forget who and what matters. The small things that make us angry for some twenty minutes eventually end and we get back to our cheery selves.

All these years, I thought happiness was all about the things I have, the experiences I submit myself to and the people around me cracking jokes and spending great times with me. Life took a turn that I never expected when I decided I had enough of being a lukewarm born-again Christian to an active Christian. Keeping my connection to God alive and fired up on a daily basis has kept me happy. I just explained a vocabulary with another vocabulary. Let us use the term contentment. The feeling of having all that you need, and believing that all you need but is not in your hands is on its way is the best feeling ever. It is understanding faith. Contentment is everything. I look at it from the times I feel like I am insufficient with myself momentarily, but in the grand scheme of things, I have it all. I do not need anything else. Sometimes, here is where you feel that everything is going against you but hang in there and in a while, you realize it is the pressures of life, trying to hold you down.

Mini testimony: I have had the toughest two years to this point, and the general cloud that would have taken over if it wanted to, would have been one of lamentation. I learned to trust in God. I am on a new level where all that baggage that had been weighing me down was left behind. It doesn’t mean that life seeking God’s Kingdom is a life where you receive a magic wand and wish away your challenges or your responsibilities. However, I have the capacity to handle them soberly, and the courage to face my fears and tackle them one at a time. This in turn eliminates that ever-blazing fire of panic, & low self-esteem because of a few issues here and there and in turn replaced it with contentment. Thanking God for what He has given me and what He is preparing me for, because this is what this flight is all about. This then keeps seeding joy that develops and grow into an everlasting state of happiness.

All other lists created will keep getting reused and like my list of stress remedies, even after I run off to the swimming pool and swim for hours, I would still come home and meditate with the surplus energy and I would easily slide down to sadness again. Happiness is a choice, it comes from the heart.