Happiness

I just turned on the news and it seems the government are to monitor our Happiness. Just how they are going to do this when happiness comes and goes so easily, I am not quite sure.

My question today is how do we find and keep our happiness?
I had felt extraordinarily happy for several weeks now and couldn't quite work out why. Nothing in my life had changed, same family,same job, same financial worries and then one morning i woke up and it had gone to be replaced by not depression but definitely a gloom. I gave myself a good talking to, ''come on now you should be happy, The sun is shining and in fact things are looking up, hubby has a new job after a long stretch of illness and unemployment which is fantastic! Financial stability is sitting on the horizon, so why so gloomy?
Well I think I finally know the answer. The last few years have been a bit tough as I have fought hubby's depression and mood swings, forcing myself to believe that things will get better. Of course life has it ups and downs and it must have been so painful for him loosing every thing from his job to his father and his dignity as he found himself doing and saying the most inappropriate of things for no reason he could even begin to explain the next day, that's if he could even remember the incident. But I seem to have spent a long time at the bottom of the trough since the turn of the century, God that makes me sound old, which of course i am a bit.

Now don't get me wrong I know that there is no reason why I should not be tested and I have tried to follow the example of my friend Margaret http://www.margaretwest.net/ and find a spiritual happiness which I truly believe is there if I could just find it. Last spring Mags gave me a gift , a Wish diary, for which I was very grateful but thought was a bit a a giggle. It was in fact the start of what I have finally realised today. On the 7.45 to Bromley south, after several weeks of carting this diary around in my bag, I thought to amuse myself on the journey ( and if I am honest to try to relieve the deep despair I was feeling on this particular day) I would start to fill it in. Now I don't really understand this wishing business and I am sure Mags would be much better placed to explain it,but it helped. I thought a little about what I was feeling. I was ANGRY.Hell was i angry that hubby was unable to control his moods, angry that even that smallest decision was beyond him and that he would spend so much time trying to decide what to prepare for Dinner that there wouldn't actually be any cooked and angry that he had left me so bloody alone. Which brings me back to Wishing.positive affirmations the instructions said, I am rather than I will." I am being patient with Hubby" I told the diary that day on the train and" I am saving for a Camper Van". Now in the long term these have both been tricky, I have been more successful with one than the other but I had made a decision and do you know what I felt good about it. As the months have passed my resolution has been tested but through this written commitment i have been able to cope a little better and slowly a kind of Happiness found me and I think people around me have felt it too. Now I skip ahead to this week. I feel really unsettled and a little Blue which is very silly because all of the things I wished for are coming through. Hubby Is much better and now has a Job which he is loving, we will have a second wage coming in which will take the pressure off a bit,in fact the whole family seem really settled so what is wrong with me? Ha! my revelation, it is change, Change is what i am finding difficult and is making me sad. I have been sailing this ship for so long single handed for so long I has felt normal and now the tide has changed and I don't know which way to steer. What I have been feeling is contentment and acceptance, happiness followed on it's own. Mr Cameron take note uncertainty causes unhappiness.