Food for thought

I'm having a little crisis these days that I can not for the life of me figure out on my own. There are many aspects to it that confuse me, many things to consider, possible consquenses that have to be weighed and effects on a lot of other people I have to think about.

It mainly boils down to happiness. Namely my own. I want to be happy (well, who doesn't?), but I'm having kind of a hard time figuring out just how I can achieve that without causing certain people around me too much grief. It's very difficult to try and figure this out, and I think I've come to a point where I simply have been thinking about it too much to be able to come to a conclution. I've reached a stage where none of my thoughts seem to make sense, I'm doubting my every decision and in effect really afraid of making a huge mistake.
I think lack of sleep isn't really helping, but with all the stuff going on I'm also not finding it easy to sleep at all - so I guess it's become a vicious circle. I'm too exhausted to look at my dilemma from a neutral point of view, and said dilemma is causing me such anxiety that I can't calm down and just sleep. That again is resulting in horrible nightmares when I eventually get to sleeping and so the whole thing is just kind of stuck.

But then again; what is happiness? Is it really something you should try so hard to achieve? Or is it something the world (btw I usually use the word 'world' as some would use 'God') hands out to you when you relax enough to be able to receive it? Is it maybe totally unobtainable, a sarcastically placed silhouette, put there by the world just to mess with us, something to keep us busy? Does it even exist? Sometimes I doubt it, because often people feel happy but that feeling can so easily be replaced by something else. So perhaps happiness isn't actually a place you can live in for the rest of your life, but something you have to accept as it is; a momentary feeling of well-being.

So what am I whining about? I certainly feel happy every once in a while, I can't deny that.
~When I help my son with his homework and for a brief minute look at his nose and realize how completely perfect it is
~when I'm digging my car out of a pile of snow and suddenly take the time to notice how pretty water in that form can be
~when a friend calls me to talk about absolutely nothing-only to chat with me because he/she cares
~when I take the first sip of coffee in the morning
~when I read a beautiful poem
~when I smell the grass in summer
~when I listen to my favourite music
~when I do well on an exam
~when I sit in silence with my father by the kitchen table back home
~when I win a game of Catan
~when I make true love
~when I think about how extremely lucky I really am to be living in a country without war
~when I take the first bite of mom's Christmas dinner
~when I meet a person I know will actually have a positive effect on my life
~when I talk to the world and it answers back...

I know that there are a lot of things I can be very, very grateful for and stuff I should probably treasure more than I already do. But still I have this feeling that there's something missing from my life right now. And I think that it's only human to always want to better your life, no matter how good it already may be. So that is what has put me in this unfortunate situation.
There are things I want to do that may not necessarily be what the people around me want me to do. Things I want to do because I want them - and not because they're right for anyone else but me. I do have a tendency to always place other people before me and that has made me forget a piece of myself in the past. I managed to fix it that time, but I'm genuinely afraid that I may be heading towards that scenario again; where I don't really know myself, my longings and needs...

So maybe I've answered my own question right there. Maybe it's time for me to place myself first and do what I want to do - if not for anything else, then to reclaim that part of me. But I've found out that when people say "it's easier said than done" - there really are cases where that is so very, very true.

So last night I asked the world for guidance, like so many times before. -And I'm not really sure how to interpret the stuff I'm getting back from it. Perhaps I'm just not liking what it's saying to me? I don't know... I do know that I'm not particularly happy right now and I want to do something about it! There are still a lot of unanswered questions, but the time has definitively come for me to take action.