Many years ago I met a beautiful girl in the north of Sri Lanka, an area at the time held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. We shared a half hour conversation. She found my pale skin and freckles amusing and laughed at the fact I had so many tiny spots on my arm.
She said that given my skin colour, I must be very wealthy – which as a then backpacking university student on a very limited budget seemed strange to hear. She was bubbly, happy and full of life.
I think of her often, especially given the end of the ceasefire in 2008 which saw the Sri Lankan government take control of the region after decades of civil war. But she especially came to mind this week when I heard Thursday (March 20) is International Happiness Day.
In our short conversation that occurred just months after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed thousands in the north of Sri Lanka alone, I discovered a few things about this young woman.
She had grown up in the same orphanage where she was stilling living, looking after its children in the same way older women had once looked after her. It was miles and miles from the nearest market or town. She slept on the floor in a tiny room with four other women. She had lost a leg to a landmine. But she could still ride her bike in the stifling humidity to wherever she wanted to go, looking gorgeous and hardly breaking a sweat at the same time.
She loved her home. She loved her friends and the fact she lived and worked with so many children. She loved the moment — despite it’s fragility and the fact further conflict in the region at the time seemed imminent. She told me she was happy.
There was no talk of work life satisfaction. There was no mention of career, or mindfulness, or stress management. There was no find a ‘job you love so you never have to work a day’. There was no five-year plan.
There was, that day, and in that fleeting moment, a conversation with a stranger from the other side of the world, something she’d rarely had an opportunity to do. For her, it was another day of peace, another chance to work and be with children, the latest generation of decades of conflict.
Her long-term hopes centred around a few simple elements that many of us take for granted: peace, security and shelter. The fact she had them, at that time, made her happy.
Every woman has the right to have hopes, dreams and wildly ambitious ideas about the future, sadly not every woman has the opportunity to pursue them. But that doesn’t stop women from being happy.
Often such dreams are to continue a moment – one, that at least for a time, guarantees peace, security and shelter. They’re on the journey of simply ‘being’ rather than continually striving to get somewhere.
Happiness can mean many different things to different women, but nothing seems to raise our individual expectations of happiness more than the geographic borders of where we’re born and the circumstances we’re born into.
Indeed, many of us like to equate happiness with a state of mind we’ll achieve at some point in the future, once we’ve ticked all the boxes of what we’ve been taught it means to be ‘successful’. When we finally get the ultimate home. A beautiful family. A well-paying job that’s fulfilling. And somehow the ability to achieve all of the above while looking ‘put together’, slim and eternally young at the same time.
We don’t need to strive for happiness, we can simply be. Make happiness a matter of who you already are rather than the consequence of some satisfaction you believe will stem from a mysterious person you hope to become.