December daily: happiness

giglet starts the December daily posting out with a bang: What does happiness look like to you now? How has that changed from a year ago?

A year ago I would have told you I had a gift for happiness.

Today I'd put it like this: I still feel that I have a gift for happiness, but it's just like people who have any other gift, for math or for music, or (like my father until his last year of life) for finding your way to anywhere from anywhere -- (1) when the gift isn't enough, we resent the necessity of actually putting in some work, and (2) also, we don't really know how to put in the work.

What my counselor was teaching me really boils down to how to develop a skill for happiness. A skill is much more valuable than a gift, because it responds to effort.

I'm still working on this; a lot of the time, I find that I know what would be good for me in the long run, but I prefer to do what would be pleasurable or easy in the short run. But for what it's worth, this list is what I took away from eight sessions of counseling on How To Learn A Skill for Happiness.

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The main difference from a year ago is that I'm learning to believe two things: that my own happiness may require work sometimes, and that my own happiness is worth work, even if something someone else has demanded has to take a backseat for a bit.