The happiest day of my life
It wasn't what I expected...
Life coach Martha Beck tells a story in The Way of Integrity about a billionaire who rang her one night at 3am, in tears. The man had just sold one of his companies for a huge sum of money. “It’s not enough!” He screamed down the phone at Beck. “When will it ever be enough?”
There is endless evidence that money, success, awards and other badges of approval never produce a lasting sense of enough or even contentment. We all know this. And still, we travel to poverty-stricken countries and marvel at how happy people seem while wealthy celebrities - the people our culture deems as having ‘made it’ - continue to suffer from drug abuse, loneliness and early death.
In my own life, I’ve noticed that achieving culturally-sanctioned badges of success not only fails to bring me happiness, it often makes me more anxious.
I’ll never forget the anxiety that followed getting top marks in my last year of high school — the feeling that I had to follow the achievement with more achievement, and that it would never end. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it up.
And I didn’t. I partied through university, travelled for as long as I could and returned to Australia completely lost as I stared down the barrel of adulting. I didn’t want a 9-5 job. I wanted to live. So I kept travelling, waitressing, starting jobs and quitting them, hoping at some point that I would land upon something that allowed me to fit in without selling my soul.
There have been countless other examples of things that I strove for in the pursuit of the kind of happiness culture sells, only to run out of steam, sorely disappointed: shiny-looking jobs, shiny-looking prospective partners, shiny-looking travel opportunities and more. Not once did it ever feel like enough. Instead, it kickstarted an anxiety that drove me to the next shiny thing, and on it went.
I remember the first time a true feeling of enough snuck up and surprised me. I was 24 and in the middle of walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain (in an attempt to figure out what to ‘do’ with my life). Being young and inexperienced, I’d planned my hike during the end of winter, with no thought to what the weather would be like. The first few days it snowed. I hurt my leg descending a mountain and ended up having to limp along slowly for 30kms a day. Then, just as my leg started to heal, the rain started and barely stopped for three weeks.
One day, I was walking across the Meseta — a notoriously difficult, boring and unscenic stretch of the Camino. Rain was coming in sideways, dripping down into my eyes and I was up to my knees in mud when the thought quietly popped into my mind: I have never been this happy. I laughed out loud, and spent the rest of the day’s walk basking in the joyous feeling of misplaced contentment, wondering, “Am I allowed to feel this good when things are so terrible?” It was almost embarrassing to admit to myself that this was the happiest day of my life.
This culture never allows us to believe that happiness and contentment can be achieved this easily. It has to be shiny, expensive, Insta-worthy. But our deep, wild selves know this messaging is untrue. If we want to find what really matters, what really inspires the good feelings we’re looking for, we need to look in the opposite direction to our culture.
As I ambled along the Camino, I didn’t figure out a single dot point in my life plan. But I did figure out a few things that mattered more than ticking off a list of achievements, and came home feeling stronger than ever before about the path I was already on. This led to travelling Australia with the man who is now my husband (I met him just before starting the Camino), having two beautiful kids and living in an amazing place.
Looking back, I realised that what I experienced on the Camino was the delicious feeling of being alive without any sense of imposed ambition or awful thought that I should be doing something productive. The feeling of enough, I learned, had nothing to do with having or doing anything. On that day, just being alive felt like enough.
Since then, I have strayed from this path many times, forgetting that it’s enough to be alive, enough to love, enough to have good intentions. I have been caught in the cultural traps of believing I need more money, success, accolades, achievements and busyness more times than I can count.
I forgive myself for this.
It is real work to continuously sift though the thoughts and beliefs that swirl around my head and discern what belongs to my wild, true self and the beliefs and longings I’ve inherited from culture. I find myself constantly starting new projects or goals and having to backtrack when I realise they don’t belong to me, that they may make me look good but they don’t make me feel good. This is never an easy thing to do.
I wrote this note to self a few years ago, and often let it pop into my head when I’ve just said a terrifying no to something the scared child inside me had hoped might that help me to finally fit in:
Use the gift of not fitting in
to begin the rich and colourful adventure
of belonging to yourself.
Life thus far has taught me that it’s NEVER worth sacrificing belonging to yourself in order to belong to the crowd, particularly in a culture like ours.
My favourite writer Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes, “Our challenge on behalf of the wild soul and our creative spirit is not to merge with any collective, but to distinguish ourselves from those who surround us, building bridges back to them as we choose. We decide what bridges will become strong and well travelled, and which will remain sketchy and empty. And the collectives we favour with relationship will be those that offer the most support for our soul and creative life.”
There is so much value to be mined from exploring what enough means to us as wild, creative souls. Our definition belongs to us, and us only.