Home Away from Home with Abi Adeboyejo
Email: abi.adeboyejo@yahoo.com Twitter: @abihafh
Imagine a world full of sad faces, hungry faces, people who are not happy with their lives. Imagine how they would feel if something happened to make them smile, just a slight lift of the lips at the corners: a crinkling of the eyes as they squeeze together to express some mirth. While some people have no say in whether they are happy or sad, most of us control this powerful tool but we are too busy to use it.
Is there a time to be happy? It would seem that modern society recognises the requirement to show some joy in certain situations. We Africans are perhaps a bit fussier in enforcing an exhibition of jollity. If you were to attend a baby’s naming ceremony you had to smile and shower the new parents with prayers (and gifts).
We are programmed to look happy at weddings, birthday parties and other public functions because these are events that are regarded as ‘happy events’. The fact that the bride at a wedding weeps throughout the ceremony is not regarded as an indication of her reluctance to marry the groom. Our culture tends to interpret a bride’s tears as a show of love for her parents and family.
We are expected to be sad at the passing of loved ones. Thankfully, this is not an emotion anyone needs to fake. It seems we have been designed to love other human beings. Parting from each other is a bitter experience that we all have to endure at one time or the other in our lives. Grieving comes naturally in times of loss, but why not happiness in times of joy?
Children spend half of the day laughing, smiling and giggling. As adults we have chosen to let events dictate how we feel and when we feel, but the greatest gift we have all been given, after life and love, is the gift of happiness.
It is so easy to give time scales for when we will be happy. Some people have turned their periods of happiness into short intervals between regular unhappiness. Some people believe that happiness is theirs only when they have a husband (or wife). If only they’d heard the joke that says ‘a man doesn’t know what happiness is until he’s married. By then it’s too late!’
For some people happiness only comes from material things – the dream job, the dream house, that dream car. Some people believe that money does not buy happiness but it easies the road to happiness. When Nigerians were voted the happiest people on earth some years ago, I guess the researchers could not understand how we still have parties, wear lavish clothes, sing and dance in spite of the level of poverty in the country. It is because many of us understand that no condition is permanent and the time to be happy is now.
There is no denying that times are hard. When we have piles of unpaid bills but no money in our bank accounts it is almost impossible to smile and be happy. When we are ill or a loved one is ill we will find it hard to wake up in the morning with a smile on our faces.
Although God has blessed all us all with the innate ability to control our emotions, we sometimes forget that by taking the right attitude and approach to issues we can make our lives happier, no matter the circumstances. For instance, a positive attitude is known to promote good health. Take a moment to find the good in any situation. When my sister’s first car was stolen from where she had parked it in Victoria Island some years ago, she wept for days. It was until an uncle told her a story of a girl who had been beaten, raped and then shot in the foot before her car was driven off by thieves that she realised how blessed she was that she was not harmed in the robbery. She even gave a testimony in church!
Also, we tend to overestimate the impact of almost every life event. We must be a bit braver and try to avoid worrying about things because the effect will probably not matter as much as we thing they will. A friend suffered years of drunken abuse from her husband. She wanted to leave him but was scared of the consequences of becoming a single parent: from the stigma of being ‘husbandless’ to coping with finances and bringing the kids up on her own. She finally took courage and left the man three years ago and now she has got her life back on track. Perhaps not such a good example, because I am not saying leaving a spouse is the way to happiness but in this case it was either she left the house with her boxes or she be taken out in a box. The options were not many.
We can all have a good life. Not necessarily one with all the trappings of wealth and affluence but one filled with many happy days and fewer sad ones. The good life is a happy life. Many of us will work hard to make a living, work hard at education and work hard at being successful in everything we do. But the one thing that we also have to work hard at is being happy.
We can be content with what we have. We can strive for more if we can, but still be happy while we strive. We can live everyday as if it is our last and thank God for what we have and who we have. We can love and be loved and waste no time on people who bring a dark cloud with them wherever they go. We can smile and share and love some more.
Let’s try to be happy today and always, because now is the time to be happy. Not yesterday, not tomorrow. Now!
