A Deeper Lunge On Happiness

“3 drunk guys entered a taxi. The taxi driver knew that they were drunk so he started the engine & turned it off again. Then the driver said, "We have reached your destination". The 1st guy gave him money & the 2nd guy said "Thank you". The 3rd guy slapped the driver. The driver was shocked thinking the 3rd drunk knew what he did. But then he asked "What was that for?" The 3rd guy replied, "Control your speed next time, you nearly killed us!”. Say, "Do I smell popcorn?" right after you fart so everybody takes a big whiff.” If those did not make a person laugh, who knows what will. According to Melinda Smith, M.A., and Jeanne Segal, Ph.D, “Humor and laughter strengthen your immune system, boost your energy, diminish pain, and protect you from the damaging effects of stress. Best of all, this priceless medicine is fun, free, and easy to use”, in addition, “Laughter is a powerful antidote to stress, pain, and conflict. Nothing works faster or more dependably to bring your mind and body back into balance than a good laugh. Humor lightens your burdens, inspires hopes, connects you to others, and keeps you grounded, focused, and alert.” If one will put it on a different way, laughter is a gun that triggers its bullet, happiness. Happiness has been defined as a state of well-being and contentment but it extends to that because happiness is not felt instantly, shared with the least expected people, and a tangible emblem of love in our busy world.

Like any other realization, happiness is not felt instantly. It goes through a few processes before one feels it. Just like a bullet fired into a man’s flesh, the pain is not felt instantly, it is felt seconds after the bullet is implanted on the tissue. As an individual with two ethnicities, it has been hard on this essay’s writer’s part to connect with her father who is Japanese especially because the author grew in the Philippines.  Language has been a huge impediment for the two of them to understand each other. Because of this hindrance, there have been plenty of misinterpretations that lead to mild quarrels. As time passes by, the daughter slowly learns the language and what her father is trying to declare is slowly beginning to make sense and lead to something positive and not understood the other way around. This progress in their relationship strengthens their connection and the build-up of joy in them. Like a seedling that has been planted on the ground, happiness does not take a short amount of time to develop and be felt, instead, it takes a lot of occurrence before one experiences it.

Secondly, happiness is shared with the least expected people. Taking the writer’s personal experience stated above, having a not-so-good relationship with her father strengthens the idea that if one would rate the possibility of her being happy with him, where 10 is the highest and 1 the lowest, people would probably give it a 1, meaning that it is almost impossible for the daughter to expect the feeling of being happy with her father. Little did she know that the once weak, gloomy relationship would evolve to a harmonious father-daughter love shared through eating together, making fun of the daughter’s mother and onesan (big sister), and cooking for each other. These series of priceless moments give effects to the making of genuine happiness. The happiness where one feels filled inside that it seems like the heart is going to burst and when it does, laughter and precious grins are what the products of the uncontainable joy become. This happiness is fortified even more when one realizes that this out of control joy is shared with the person that was once chosen last or was never chosen at all to be happy with.

The last unexplored implication of happiness is that it is a tangible emblem of love in our busy world. Nowadays, people are full of activity that they often times forget how to stop, think, and appreciate the things that they had, are having, and could have had. Sometimes, people also find it hard to feel and give love. This might be because of lack of happiness. Happiness that was once theirs but never held on to because of their reason, perhaps because of blindness of the fact that everything has to be bought with money. Love and happiness is like a “buy one get one free” encouragement, because if a person knows how to be happy, he can also share this happiness to another one, sharing is also loving. Happiness is something visible in this world, it is a representation of love because one cannot easily be loved and feel sad about it. Happiness is something that be produced consciously and easily if a person wants to, and once it is shared continuously, it builds up a greater sentiment that is beyond a human’s comprehension, love.

People term happiness as being pleased but it only lengthens to that because happiness has deeper meanings. These significances were specified by the paragraphs abovementioned that gave a different point of view on happiness through the writer’s personal experience. Looking back, happiness was established as a late-felt sensation judged against a bullet shot on a victim’s flesh, another meaning was honored by the people whom it is experienced with where feeling it with the least expected person gives another unforeseen scoop of joy, and to finish, happiness is something that can be easily grasped (as long as the person is willing to be delighted) compared to love but when practiced and shared to another, evolves to love in itself.