Happiness

Happiness is a seed that each of us was gifted with at birth... that some of us never get to see root, mature, or blossom because we are always waiting on someone else's sunlight & water to help it grow..... My happiness is my own. It was planted inside of me at my inception as a gift from creation and is nested in one of the crevices of my heart. I often do an exercise where I visual what my happiness looks like... I Imagine that it is a Topiary evergreen. It use to be a finicky frail little thing that needed LOTS OF attention, cultivation, pruning, love and care but i was no gardener so i had No CLUE how to care for it. So I sought out local "gardeners" to maintain my happiness for me. Here was the problem with that... My happiness is unique to me. No other person can ever truly know how to cultivate my personal tree of happiness. They will never know how much water or sunlight will make my happiness grow or die. Only I truly know. What I experienced.... So I brought in these gardeners ( friends family romantic interests) and made them all inappropriately assigned them as experts in my happiness even though mostly they had no clue what they were doing and eventually the leaves of my happiness started to turn brown. Cue sadness... This frustrated me that sometimes i thought I cld feel my happiness grow( but it was always temporary) which in turn made me temporarily feel happy and other times I could feel it dying and that made me sad ( or angry or depressed). I experienced this for 33 years 👀. Cue reality check... Tragedy hit. Which caused my heart to be broken open, completely. Right there inside, I was then able to see that there was a ton of shit that had been mixed into the soil that my happiness was planted in... Other ppls shit. Weeds had sprouted up ( those weeds were other ppls ideals, fears, insecurities, pain, ect...) And it had bound the roots of my true happiness and produced some twisted happiness runners ( runners are underground roots that spread underground and crop up in other places to start new plants). I had to go in and de-weed and clean ALL of that stuff out myself.

So saddened at the condition of my happiness, I began to add in my own sunshine water and food ( smiles laughter love positive experiences). I enriched my soil and NOW this happiness of mine is growing!! My happiness is not mine to give away to anyone and while I can add to other ppls happiness and they can add to mine... they can not take away from it nor are they responsible for it. Now.... I do things that add to me. That grow me. That make me smile. That enrich my joy. That excite me and conjure my imagination. That give me hope. That deepen my belief in self. That heal me. I don't wait for others to do it for me, but rather see it as a blessing when others add to me in those ways. I independently own the rights to my brand of happiness and its not for sale or lease. Im a student.... Im still learning the ropes of this thing so sometimes there are a few brown leaves ( sadness) that creep in when im not attentive enough but all in all, I'm getting the hang of this thing and that in and of itself makes me HAPPY! *We are a reflection and extension of one another. So if I am perpetually tapped in to my joy...it will reverberate to you as love.* Im not trying to be deep, I'm just speaking my current truth. *things I've learned over the past 4 years* >From x-(wo)man to god(dess) *Cue Pharrell* " Because I'm Happy"

Naz

2/14/15