RIP Zimba :-(

Yesterday I lost my little baby “chicky”, Zimba. Thank you for your love and kindness on Twitter & Facebook. He touched many people’s lives in his 16 years in this world as a dog named ZIMBA. (“Zimba” means: The Warrior… to me, he was my “Dream Warrior”) I have hours and hours of footage of him as a young dog swimming and playing and running around with his “pack” and so when I’m ready, I will post a video. Your stories about your dogs helps me go through this intense pain. Thank you.

Tags: chicken, death, dog, dream warrior, lisa murray, lisamurray, loss, sadness, zimba

Happiness

It’s hard to be happy sometimes, isn’t it?  What IS happiness?

Dictionary.com definition of “HAPPINESS”: 

1.	the quality or state of being happy.

2.	good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy.

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Okaaaay…. but what is “Happy”?

1. Characterized by good luck; fortunate.
2. Enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy.
3. Being especially well-adapted; felicitous: a happy turn of phrase.
4. Cheerful; willing: happy to help.
5. 1. Characterized by a spontaneous or obsessive inclination to use something. Often used in combination: trigger-happy.
   2. Enthusiastic about or involved with to a disproportionate degree. Often used in combination: money-happy; clothes-happy.

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Hm.  That still doesn’t really answer my question.  I mean, what is it to be “happy”?  Do you think that happiness comes naturally or do you think it’s something that you have to do/think/etc. to achieve?  When I think about the times in my life that I have been happy, I don’t remember “trying”, I just “was”.  You know?  But maybe I *was* doing something and I just didn’t realize it.  What do you think?  I kind of have the feeling that happiness is our natural state and that anytime we are not experiencing happiness then we are working through another emotion that is currently covering up the happiness.  Kind of like the sun.  It doesn’t turn off or go black, it just goes behind clouds or where you are on the planet moves to another part of the planet for a while.

Sometimes when I’m trying to figure out the meaning of a word, I find that it’s helpful to examine the meaning of its opposite.  So now we have to decide what is the opposite of “happy”.  Is it “sad”?  Or is it “mad”?  Or would it be “depressed”?  Let’s start with “sad”…actually, “sad” used the word “sorrow” a lot so let’s start with “sorrow”:

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Sorrow
–noun
1. distress caused by loss, affliction, disappointment, etc.; grief, sadness, or regret.
2. a cause or occasion of grief or regret, as an affliction, a misfortune, or trouble: His first sorrow was the bank failure.
3. the expression of grief, sadness, disappointment, or the like: muffled sorrow

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That seems like the opposite of “active happiness”, you know? Let’s look up what I think is the opposite of the “state of happiness”, depression.

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Depression

–noun
1. the act of depressing.
2. the state of being depressed.
3. a depressed or sunken place or part; an area lower than the surrounding surface.
4. sadness; gloom; dejection.
5. Psychiatry. a condition of general emotional dejection and withdrawal; sadness greater and more prolonged than that warranted by any objective reason. Compare clinical depression.
6. dullness or inactivity, as of trade.
7. Economics. a period during which business, employment, and stock-market values decline severely or remain at a very low level of activity.
8. the Depression. Great Depression.
9. Pathology. a low state of vital powers or functional activity.
10. Astronomy. the angular distance of a celestial body below the horizon; negative altitude.
11. Surveying. the angle between the line from an observer or instrument to an object below either of them and a horizontal line.
12. Physical Geography. an area completely or mostly surrounded by higher land, ordinarily having interior drainage and not conforming to the valley of a single stream.
13. Meteorology. an area of low atmospheric pressure.

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OMG, I’m so confused!!! WTF!? Okay, let me just try to break it down in the way I see it….

If, when you were growing up, you weren’t allowed to express anger or sadness, or if those emotions were thought of as “annoying” or “weak”, then whenever you felt a hint of those feelings, you would push them down and out of your consciousness, right?  And so fast-forward years into the future, and there you are as an adult, not feeling “happy” and wondering why it isn’t as easy to be “happy” as as it used to be.  It might make sense to assume that you may have years of anger and sadness caked on top of the happiness that lives at the base of your being.  If we can allow those “lesser emotions” the attention they so rightly deserve, I believe they will lift up, flush through us and *magically* be gone! What is left is what is underneath, our natural state:  Happiness.

Easier said than done right? No shit. It’s hard as hell to keep track of when you’re lying to yourself and when you’re being honest. Sometimes it’s a knee-jerk reaction to lie to yourself. You don’t even know you’re doing it until way into it and then you stop and say, “wait a minute, this is bullshit! I’m pissed!” hahaha! Right? There is a great quote from the book/movie REVOLUTIONARY ROAD: “Nobody ever forgets the truth, they just get better at lying to themselves.” SO TRUE.

Don’t get me wrong though, I believe in life we are here to learn. LIFE IS MESSY. We aren’t meant to be happy all the time. That would just be plain scary if everybody was always happy. One of my favorite quotes: “Ships are safe in the harbor, but that’s not what ships were built for.”

So get out there and get messy. I promise to to the same. And every now and then when you feel like you’re in a rut, try some new techniques to get yourself back to “happy”. Good luck.

Click here to learn How To Be Happy

Tags: depression, happiness, sadness