Loud Happy

I am learning a lot being in my relationship, now.  I love that my love has so much to teach me.  We are learning from each other, and we are growing as individuals from our interaction, as we get closer to each other.  It has forced us both to realize things and consider things that previously wasn't really applicable or personal to our experience and now is relevant.  I could go on about the many things I've learned.. or things I learned in the past that wasn't relevant til now, but I'll just focus on one item for this post, which I realized, yesterday.

So, one theme of application that I feel we both understand and have been good at respecting is the balance between respecting personal space and sharing our concerns with each other and accepting care in those areas, where we previously had a history of dealing with things alone.  But, it's an offshoot of this that I wanted for focus here.

So, the other night, I was dealing with work related stress, and she had been dealing with her own stresses unrelated to me.  We both had comforted each other.  But, come date time, I still felt it weighing on me.  As I reflected on it, I realized what I really needed was not to solve the stress.  I had various stresses when we first started dating, but it didn't have the same effect.  Why?  Because, come date time I had (and generally always have in our times) closed all that down to just enjoy my time with her.  I'm protective of that happy time, and I'm not willing to let anything get in the way of it.  So... I focused on her, and the night was wonderful. And that's the lesson learned.  Problems don't always need to be  resolved.  They CAN just be replaced in our mind with happy things. 

There's a very good movie I've seen dozens of times and quoted a lot called We Bought a Zoo, but this part is new to quotes from me.  In the movie, the family had lost their mom and wife.  They were struggling to process the loss.  In one scene, the daughter complains to her dad that the neighbors "happy is too loud" from their party.  As the movie progresses, the father takes the kids out to live somewhat new to help them be happy.   The daughter is much cheered up by the new, but the son is struggling.  He argues with the father to ask what's so good about being happy?  The father replied, "That you're happy."

The overall message of the film I think applies to much of the world, today.  This first week of a new government has felt like a month, for example.  We all have our own struggles, and it is important at times to let them do their work in leading us to make choices for our better.  However, those choices are not to stay down in the mire and darkness.  They are to follow a new vision to a place we can be happy... and then to be happy as you enact the vision.  Happiness is possible, even with difficult things in your life, if you just change your focus and replace the sorrow or stress with something good.  And, I felt that is a lesson very worth sharing to others.