GETTING BACK TO BASICS (UNIT 10)

With my lease ending soon, I've been thinking a lot about what I'll be moving, how I'll be moving it and more importantly where I'll be moving it to.  Lately I've felt somewhat claustrophobic in my apartment.  1) because it's very tiny, 2) I basically live in my bedroom; while the living room is just a few feet away, it never quite felt 'homey' enough for me to want to spend a good amount of time in there and 3) it seems inevitable that after a year in one place I always seem to become somewhat restless and anxious to toss all my stuff out and start fresh.  In addition, as more time passes, I seem to notice the downsides of my living space rather than begin to enjoy it more.  This could be due to multiple factors (roommates, location, living style, focusing too much on creating the 'perfect' ambiance, etc.), but either way, it's what seems to end up happening.

This has been an 'issue' ever since I came back from living in Honduras, where my bedroom consisted of a dresser, bed, ceiling fan and 5 hangers, which held all of the clothing items I owned.  Sufficed to say I quickly got used to living a very basic, unattached lifestyle.  But with that lifestyle came certain aspects, or lack of, for that matter.  I was never stressed, never cared about what to wear or the clothing I had/didn't and was just more at ease, carefree and relaxed than I've ever been in my life.  Granted, we can't all live on a small island in the middle of the Caribbean, possession-free and teaching tourists how to scuba dive forever (actually, why can't we?  That's a whole other blog post in itself!).

Considering that I'm not at a point where I can return to that lifestyle at the moment, I've recently started wondering why I've had it engrained in my head that I can't be that happy or stress-free again unless I were to return to the same environment.

After talking with my mom about the whole topic, she left me with some great advice: where you are shouldn't determine your happiness.  Obviously living in what most would refer to as paradise definitely makes anyone at least a little more content, but the main message she was trying to get across was that at the end of the day, you are responsible for your happiness.

It's a pretty empowering thing, if you think about it.  A lot of the time, this can be a really hard thing for some of us to grasp control of; it can be easier to succumb to unhappiness than to 'fight' for happiness. But in coordination with my posts from Unit 8 & 9, things such as remembering to smile or recognize the simple things in life can make 'obtaining' this personal happiness just a little bit easier.

On that note, I've made it a major goal of mine (who needs New Years to make resolutions?) to really try and take power of my happiness when I move on to my next destination, whether it be a studio apartment somewhere in Seattle or a tiny house with a roommate I don't really know in LA.  My happiness is mine and that's something, unlike many other things, that I always have control over, despite my surroundings, and I plan on utilizing that power a lot more often from now on.