Note to Myself: Happiness

Sometimes I feel that I live in a country where 30 means already “old”. Until you are this age, you have to have your own house, your own family, your child or at least planning one. I don’t have any of these. Not even that “steady” career that I have been working for so many years to achieve, and I have given so much to it, doesn’t seem so steady these days.

“What have I done in 30 years? What have I achieved?” – questions that are impossible not to ask yourself. “Am I too old already for the things mentioned above? Is there something wrong with me?” – again, haunting questions that you cannot avoid if you are a human being living in a society full of stereotypes.

I believe happiness, and some achievements, can be measured in small things, in the fingerprints that you leave somewhere on earth and on a soul – either they are remembered or not. I feel that those moments are in small hands rubbing your forehead when you don’t feel well, in friends who are stubborn to let you go and promise they will stay, no matter how bitchy you can be with them, in long walks, orange benches, books that change your perspectives, trips, long or short, in places you find your peace, students who tell you “thank you”, or achieve their dreams with your help, in all the people, all the friends, to whom you showed kindness and helped their dreams come true, in people with whom you shared some smiles, and build new memories, even if you let them go, too afraid of distances of different kinds. Memory, with its maze, is definitely my identity.

Call me Ray. Not because in my soul there is always sun and no storms, not because I am an optimist, not because sometimes I do not have power to believe in something/someone, but because I choose to remember the nicest memories, to see the goodness in people, to forgive more than maybe I should have. There is not a big thing that defines us, that we did/accomplished until this age, but the small, the tiny ones, that shape our wholeness so far.