Don’t expect me to list the happiest states or the least. Not for the world would I step into that argument. Probably, most of us love our home state, and we wouldn’t care where some innocuous study placed it. Besides, many of our friends live in other countries, and I wouldn’t want to leave them out.
However, I can use generalizations and discuss the five types of Well-Being the study used.
1. Overall evaluation of your life.
2. Emotional Health
3. Physical health
4. Healthy behaviors or life-styles
5. Job satisfaction.
You could rate yourself using these five elements. On a scale of one to five, how would you rate yourself—living in the “state” or state you do.
For me, my overall evaluation of my life would be a five. Emotional health, oh, 4.5. (I do worry and fume and fuss over things I cannot control.) Physical health, probably a 4, simply because I’m not 21 anymore and do have a few tiny health issues I can easily control. Healthy behaviors or life-styles, definitely a five. I don’t smoke and never have, I’m not an addictive personality to anything, I eat healthy so that my lab tests always get a happy face (really, my doctor draws a happy face on my lab sheets), and I get moderate exercise. Job satisfaction? I’m retired and happily so. But when I did work, I’d give myself another five. In total, I am a rather happy person.
Right now, I’m reading a novel by Emilie Richards titled “Happiness Key.” I love her books, and this one is about four women living in concrete block ramshackle cabins on a spit of land in Florida called Happiness Key. One owns the cabins, and has fallen from a wealthy life when her husband went to prison; one is a foreigner who finds herself married to a man she doesn’t know; one is a middle-aged woman who yearns for her husband who pays her no mind, so she finds one who will; and one is an older woman who has become forgetful and sad. They come together to solve a problem.
The best point about this novel is the character-building Emilie Richards so capably weaves. I want to keep reading, not to find out how the problem is solved, but to learn how each of these women find happiness.
How do you find your happiness? Surely, it’s not because you live in Vermont, or California, or Utah. Each of us is different, yet all the same. Women in a world of men, finding our own way.
Keep writing. Much of my happiness comes from writing and creating, and I’ll bet it’s the same for you.
Celia Yeary
SHOWDOWN IN SOUTHFORK: eBook available at:
http://www.thewildrosepress.com/
ALL MY HOPES AND DREAMS-a Cactus Rose—
Print and eBook available at: www.thewildrosepress.com
www.celiayeary.com
http://www.celiayeary.blogspot.com
