Today is International Day of Happiness and I’m going to start with being a bit of a grouch. The trouble is with these “Days” is that there are a lot of expectations. Valentines Day, Fathers Day, International Womens Day..…all of these come with the insistence that we must prove our weight in the area of womanhood, or fatherhood, or love. Don’t get me wrong, I love Fathers, I love women, hell, I love love. But having to dial it up on a specific day (and post the results on Instagram as social proof) leaves me more Oscar the Grouch than Tigger.

In our desire to pursue more happiness and more fulfilment and more satisfaction, life’s treadmill can often seem relentless as we keep striving, keep pushing, keep yearning for more. Happiness can seem like a destination point, rather than the journey or the vehicle itself. “Shout Hallelujah come on, get happy,” trills Judy Garland, but how do we actually “get happy?”

Today is a case in point. Today I will be working from home. This will involve sitting at my desk for most of the day, creating a leadership programme. This may be hugely inspirational, or it may be quite labour intensive. Once I’ve finished that, the kids will be home from school and then my sights will turn to domesticity in the form of sorting the evening meal, attempting to encourage the execution of homework with utterly indifferent children and laundry. Undoubtedly laundry. International Day of Happiness? International Day of the Absolute Ordinary, more like.

But here’s the thing: Happiness is more often a decision, than a feeling. We have to choose to feel it and to experience it, even in the midst of the seemingly ordinary. As Brene Brown writes in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, “Joy is not a constant. It comes to us in moments—often ordinary moments. Sometimes we miss out on the bursts of joy because we’re too busy chasing down extraordinary moments.”

So today, on this International Day of Happiness, be encouraged to see the happiness in the usual. In the familiar. In the ordinary. In the mess. It’s there. Come on, get happy. Shout Hallelujah.

Be encouraged,