Say you were wired backwards.  Perhaps home as a kid was loud, chaotic–even supposedly a “big happy family” that felt scary and unpredictable.  Stuff happened all the time.  There was no stability and vacations started out with dad screaming: “We’re going to have fun if it KILLS us!!” 

So we grow up excellent at crisis situations, office management, paralegal–handling conflict as a way of work, familiar with anxiety and fear.  Then all of a sudden you learn different tools and life calms down.  Friends are communicative, family situations are discuss and clarified.  Weird but true.

What the heck do we do with happiness?  As a kid, I really felt the only way to be happy was to be in denial or inebriated.  I didn’t trust being happy–someone was setting me up for something or I did something wrong.

Today I surf on what looks like happiness around me–tulips, tall green grass, and cherry blossoms.  Maybe beauty is a sign of being comfortable with life which seems very much like enjoying being happy.

I breathe in beauty, I breathe out comfort.