Reasons to Be Happy
I have always been a big believer in “Be happy”; I do my best to follow it all the time and never forget.
Along my way, I met many different people, from different cultures, countries, cities, religions and lives. All of them had reasons to be happy, but were most of them happy? Probably not.
This year I met Johnathan, he is 68, highly intelligent, clever, mannered, with a great sense of humor and depressed.
It has been 16 years now that he lives on anti-depressants, spends most of his time at home, in bed. His mood goes radically up and down, and sometimes he really loses it. What is the reason for his depression? Loneliness. Severe loneliness.
He lives alone in his flat, in which there are not many colors of life, he is divorced and his only daughter comes to see him quite rarely.
Once we had a conversation, and I said something he found funny, he smiled and said, “I can’t laugh, it will break my depression”.
It made me smile because he knows he is making a choice to be depressed.
As we all, we make choices daily.
I asked myself, does Johnathan have reasons to be happy? Yes, he does.
The same way as we all do.
After meeting him, I have realized there is a bit of “Johnathan”, in all of us, not matter who we are, where we live, how we live, or what we have.
What matters is whether we choose to be happy and live as fully as we can.
“Life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you”.
– Maya Angelou
