What makes you happy?

A couple of nights ago at the end of my shift at the restaurant I ordered something to eat and sank down into a seat at the bar to eat my dinner quietly.  It wasn’t very busy at that time of the night and I pored over the newspaper while I ate.  Some of my co-workers were sitting over at another table, but they were talking animatedly about work…not complaining, necessarily, but dramatizing the events of the weekend over a few beers.  I wasn’t into it.

In the Ideas section of the Toronto Star I found a little blurb about a man who thinks he has found the key to living a happy life.  These kinds of articles always intrigue me because, well, isn’t it the aim of most people to be happy?  If there are any free hints available to me I’m going to pounce all over them.  It’s not that I am an unhappy person; quite the contrary, in fact.  I like my life a lot and I think that I’ve made some pretty good decisions about how to live it.  Staying away from workplace drama is just one of those small choices I make every day that helps me stay happy.

The blurb I read references a discussion that took place between the journalist, John Sakamoto, and Leo Babauta, the writer of a book called “The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essentials … in Work and in Life.”  (Leo also keeps a blog called Zen Habits.  His post, Peaceful Simplicity: How to Live a Life of Contentment explains more strategies for living a contented life.)  Leo’s basic strategy for living a happy life is to determine what activities in life make you happy, and to concentrate your time on those things, cutting out “pretty much everything else”.  Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it?

I don’t know…I think that this may be somewhat easier said than done.  After all, we all have obligations and obstacles in life, and while I’d like to spend the majority of my time knee-deep in the vegetable garden, I have work to do, bills to pay, a relationship to participate in and a home to maintain.

Leo’s strategy got me thinking, though.  What are the things in life that make me the happiest?  What are the things that bring about the most contentment in my day-to-day life? If I had to narrow my list of happiness-inducing activities down to four, they would include:

Spending time with my friends and family (You might argue that these are two separate activities, but I would argue back that I consider many of my good friends to be family…we don’t have to share blood ties in order for me to consider you a part of my family.)

Spending time with Graham

Hobbies (gardening, writing)

Caring for our home (cooking, decorating)

The key to my happiness, then, according to Leo, would be for me to pretty much eliminate any activities that don’t fall inside this list of four.  Does this mean that I should completely stop cleaning the house?  Forget about ever exercising again?  Stop trying to learn new skills?  These are also things that make me happy now and then.  I guess the key would be to concentrate on the things that make a person feel happy, rather than giving up on the other things that hang around on the periphery.  So I’m going to experiment, focusing on making these four things a priority on a day-to-day basis and see how it works.

What would your four happiness-inducing activities be?

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