Holding Onto Happiness

I’d been out all day at the salon. Since it was a salon belonging to a friend of mine from high school, the almost six-hour process of braiding my hair was filled with fun, laughter, reminiscences of high school times, and of course, a little gossip. I did laugh a lot for the most of it and then we moved to the topic of regrets.

Regret is such a delicate topic because we’ve all had them at one point in our lives or the other. Some of us have consciously buried those regrets and tried to move on from them, but some others have let them haunt them, maybe because that regret completely altered the course of their life or changed something vital in their feeling of existence.

I think one of my most dreaded kinds of regrets, are the ones that revolve around, “You don’t know what you have till it’s gone.” This quote is almost always at the back of my mind and as many of us have come to realize, it’s not just material possessions that this could be applied to. It could be applied to people, it could be applied to opportunities. And by extension, even status.

And so, it made me think of the song I’m going to share today. Because it’s not just about seeing the value of what you’ve got till it’s lost, it’s about taking charge and protecting the things that make you happy. Holding on to it because of how fickle life is and how you could lose everything in the blink of an eye.

Rhys Lewis, in this song, reminisces about the old times. Memories of a life that he lived that’s no more, rushes through his mind. I can’t completely place what it is he regrets. But lines like how he misses, “talking late at night, getting drunk on cheap red wine,” makes me feel that it may be about a lover. Someone who made him happy and he probably didn’t see the value of, till that love was gone.

Until our dying breath, he says we should hold onto happiness. It resonates with me the lines that say that the deepest of rivers can move so fast and that regrets hurt the most so when we’ve got it, we shouldn’t let go. Sometimes we don’t know that we’ve got it. We get used to the availability of something, so we begin to undermine its value or we don’t even see it at all.

I think the first step to holding on to happiness is to be grateful. When we carry gratitude in our hearts and become appreciative of our blessings, it’s easier to see the good things in our lives, the happy things. And from there we can treasure them, hold on to them. I rank regrets with loss as one of the worst things to feel. Even though, it’s impossible to go through life without having regrets, it would be less painful if it were for things that may not be trivial, but at least, we can move on from.

But the constant feeling weighing us down because we had something good and we lost it, possibly due to our insecurities, ingratitude, ill-judgements, and all of that is just too sad for anyone to go through. Speaking to myself and all my dear readers, and especially as we’re entering the new year, to remember to always be grateful, and value the blessings in our lives so that we can be truly happy.

Jhymi🖤

_{Thumbnail Image is mine.}