I presented a program last week based loosely on a blog post from last year. I had titled the speech “Finding the Happy Places,” and right from the start I wanted to make it clear that you could be right thinking I meant happy places as a plural because I was speaking to a group of people, but in fact, I would have still referred to multiple places even if I was speaking to a single person.

I publicly eschewed the notion that there is a happy place we strive to reach where we escape the world and its problems. In fact, the premise to the presentation was that each of us has many, many happy places that are of the world, and there are where we relive happy times even though consciously, we may not remember the event that led to that happy memory. “The memory may have long faded while the space remains a special place for you,” I said more than once. An example I shared is a large, overstuffed chair in my bedroom. This particular chair is old, maybe older than I am (gasp), but my daughter cleaned it, repaired it, refurbished it, just for me. At least once a day I sit in that chair, and at least once a day I smile to myself and feel good about it. While I sit in that chair I may or may not associate it with the work and the love my daughter put into it, but each time I sit in it I feel welcome, warm, loved. I feel happy. It is one of my happy places.

I’m not sure how I got interested in these miniature moments of happiness and their attendant places of lasting good will. I think I am more sure of why we experience them. And to be clear, I’ve never heard this explanation before although I’m sure someone much smarter than I already figured it out and perhaps even wrote one of the perennial bestsellers in one of the many sections of the local bookstore I rarely walk through. But I think, I think, they are there to keep us if not young, at least upright and moving forward.

Every now and then I’ll reveal some small part of me although I can’t imagine anyone reading these words having a complete picture of me. For the record, I’m feisty enough (I suppose that is the polite word) to be certain I will live to be 100, but realistic enough to question whether I will be around to blow out the candles on my seventieth, and that is coming up, just past the next couple stop lights. Although for almost all my adult life I have worked in hospitals or their related clinics, I was 56 before I ever experienced a hospital from a patient’s point of view, and it was 8 months after that first admission that I was eventually discharged to home, all that just the first in a series of ins and outs over the next 6 years. So you might be correct thinking happy places may not abound in my recent life. You might be.

Very few would mistake a hospital as a happy place except perhaps those visiting the maternity wing. But of all those nights I spent sleeping in a hospital bed, there were very few when I would say, “Ugh, another day and another one like it to look forward to tomorrow.” No, no! Most nights I know I fell asleep thinking, “this wasn’t a bad day, and I know tomorrow will have to be better.” Yes, maybe for the first few weeks I grumbled and groaned myself to sleep, but after a while, even the hospital held its places of positivity. Where were they? I don’t know. More correctly, I don’t remember. As I said (more than once), “The memory of the event may have long faded while the space remains a special place for you.”

Is there a point to all this rambling? (Other than it’s Monday and you’ve come to expect to see ramblings from me on Mondays.) The point I tried to make, that I wanted to make while I was speaking, is to stop running away! You don’t have to escape the world to be happy. Happiness is within your reach and comes from how you interact with the world. You won’t find happiness “out there” at that mythical place where society wants to escape. It’s “right here” at the mystical places where our memories live, where our loves live, where we find the good from all the days past, and where we know it will be there in the days left.

I closed my speech with this. “Someday you will be walking along with someone and for no clear reason you will start to feel a warmth about you, a glimmer will hit your eye, and a smile will break out across your face. Whoever is with you will look at you and say, “What?” And you will answer, “Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.” And that’s how you know – you just walked through a happy place.”

So tell me…where are some of your happy places?

There is no shortcut to success and the most successful are those most passionate about being patient. That’s why we say Patience is a Passion in the latest Uplift!