defining happiness

“The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or even seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will”
Denis Waitley

I usually shy away from defining myself, others and the world around me; doing so all too often creates this prison-like box, forcing your subject to act within it, according to the definition it's been given. Although most things, ideas and people are too complex to define completely and accurately, I think that exploring the characteristics of happiness, and defining them for yourself, make it something much more easily attainable. You know what you are up against, what you are striving for, and therefore you can take the steps necessary to reach it.
So what makes you happy? It can be completely different from the person sitting next to you. Is it something you can feel any day of the week, or something that you reward yourself with after hours and days of hard work? Is it something you feel when you take part in a certain activity or are around certain people?
I have defined my happiness as being grateful and aware of all that is going on around me. Taking hold of all of my senses and forcing myself to be completely in the moment. I can look at a given moment as lackluster, banal, the same thing I did last week. Or I can reexamine it and realize that I am surrounded by good people that make me feel like I am loved and also moving forward, and even though the warmth within me is subtle, at least I can feel it. Happiness does not have to be jump-for-joy ecstasy every time for it to be happiness. Why can't you define happiness as the absence of sadness? Like white is the absence of color. But sadness and happiness are all too often completely related and dependent on each other (which I will discuss in a later post), so that idea can only go so far.
What I am trying to get across to you is that you can transform the simplest, most ritual of moments and situations and sentences but putting yourself in that moment, situation and sentence. You can apathetically sit at the bus stop, waiting for your moment to stand up and pay your fare, or you can engage yourself and find happiness in your own thoughts, in gazing at the curls of your shoelaces, in thinking of the pure luck of the arrangement of your atoms to allow you to even question your own happiness.