Happiness, the ingredients

I’ve been thinking about my recipe for personal happiness and what the basic ingredients of that happiness might be.  This is what I came up with– so far.  (I’ve taken as a “given” my health and having food, shelter and clothing.)

Things I Care About and Think Are Important

• Having a neat, clean, orderly and aesthetically pleasing environment to live in.
• Celebrating things: birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, Groundhog Day—any excuse for a celebration
• Having friends and being a friend
• Reliability. Being “count-on-able.”  Doing what I say I am going to do.
• Promptness.  Being on Time. Honoring my commitments.
• Taking real action towards dreams and goals.  Talk alone doesn’t count.
• Fun.  Having fun regularly, daily.
• Balance.  Work + Play.
• Seeing the glass half full.  Worldview is skewed towards Optimism and Fun.
• Generosity.  Going out of my way to help.
• Regularity in daily habits.  Eating. Sleeping. Working. Exercising.  Daily rituals enable me to thrive.
• Being a responsible pet owner.  Understanding that animals rely solely on me for their care and happiness and that if I choose to have pets I need to put their needs before my own.

And to sum up:

• Compatability.  (Definition: Capable of orderly, efficient integration and operation with other elements in a system with no modification or conversion required.) The people I live with, and choose to be in daily contact with need to operate smoothly together in terms of daily habits, rituals, and world view.  They need to care about, and think the same things are important as I do. If that happens, then I feel in harmonious collaboration with life, which in turn creates in me a feeling of deep, rich, fudgey happiness.

Yum.