Do we have to be lucky to be happy?

“The more we work, the luckier we get”.-Tero Pilvi

When I was flying here to Sierra Leone I met this Finnish guy on the airport and we started to talk about happiness and later on we changed some thoughts via email and he sent me email saying that I should write about luck. So now I am doing it.

So do we need to be lucky to be happy? I am also doing a documentary about happiness while I am here in Sierra Leone and I just did my first interview yesterday. I asked a question: “Are you happy”? And this local fisherman answered: “No”, because he didn’t have nets to get any fish but he would be happy if he would get those net. So I started to think what do you need to be happy?

We stayed overnight on an island and this local fisher man provided us food, drinks and made us a campfire. I gave him few advices how to do business and how to get customers, he really appreciated to help I was giving him and we talked about happiness. His happiness was depending on fishing nets. With those nets he could get enough money to buy some food, a land to build a house and get his daughter to a school.

So, for happiness we need:

       Food and drinks

       Place to live

       Something to do

       Someone to love

Simple things!

All the rest of the things for happiness come inside us. Happiness is inside us. We just have to find it.

Do we need luck to be happy?

I think we don’t. We make our own luck. The more we work, the luckier we get is a good saying and it is true. We can be happy anywhere if we are provided with basic things which I mentioned earlier but we have to work for our happiness.

When we were on that island yesterday, we ate a simple dinner, we slept on the ground and we drank water. We were HAPPY. We had a nice group of people and we talked about everything between the earth and the sky. It was amazing, it was really good. All our basic needs were satisfied so were able to be happy. That was happiness.

Why we complicate our lives with all the worries and problems? The more things we buy, the more complicate our lives become. We buy a big house, so we have to clean more; we buy lots of clothes so have to wash more. We buy two cars and we have to do maintenance for them and everything cost money. To get all that we have to work more and at the end we are so stressed that we forget what happiness is. We make our life so full of material stuff that we don’t have time to be happy because we have to take care of all that stuff. Why?

The more simple life we have the happier we are.

We have to understand the difference between a pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is depending on external things and happiness is not. The more we pleasure ourselves unhappier we might get. Pleasure is short term solution for sadness for example unhealthy eating. If a person eats unhealthy all the time he or she becomes fat and will have lots of health problems. A good health is a basic for happiness.

Should we buy fewer things to get more time to ourselves and to our families? How much is enough? Does all that stuff  really make us happy?    

These are good questions; we just don’t think about them, we just buy…

We make our own luck, like we make our happiness. We have our own lives and we can make our own decisions. I decide to be happy.

“If you want to be happy, be”. –Leo Tolstoi