How would you respond if I told you that you can be truly happy, right here and right now, regardless of who you are, where you are and what you are doing?

Yes, you understood well. You can be happy here and now no matter what.

I realize that this sort of approach can sound a little crazy at first, but the reason for that is that most of us have been raised to believe that you first need to meet a hundred conditions before allowing yourself to be happy.

Many people believe that they need to work really hard in life and achieve everything that is expected of them before they allow themselves the right to be happy. But you must be aware that no one ever lives to see that day.

Why?

Because happiness is the path, not the destination.

We have been taught to see happiness as destination, not the path. But happiness is the path, not the destination. If you are not happy while you are traveling through life, reaching a certain destination (in other words, attaining goals, etc.) will not give you what you wanted to experience before you embarked on the journey in the first place.

Happiness is the path, not the destination. Remember this well and keep it in mind at all times.

One of the reasons why many people do not understand what we have just said is that they do not understand what happiness really is. Many people confuse happiness with pleasure, but happiness and pleasure are two different things. You can be completely dissatisfied, and yet happy at the same time. Pleasure brings brief moments of satisfaction, while happiness is a lasting thing. Pleasure is always connected with fulfilling a certain desire, whereas the presence of happiness in our life has nothing to do with any desire we might have.

Keep this in mind because it is a most fundamental approach toward life. The way you experience 99% of the things you do in life will depend on the way you think of the relationship between happiness and pleasure.

I consider myself one of the most dissatisfied people in the whole world. No matter what I achieve, my sense of pleasure never lasts more than three days. I would even dare say that I am bored when I feel pleased.

However, at the same time I am truly happy and I live filled with the sense of enthusiasm, joy, and inner peace. I clearly feel the sense and purpose of my life. I know that there is an endless source of joy and peace inside me, and I am aware that outward circumstances per se have nothing to do with that. Outward circumstances can have an effect on my life only if I allow them to have an effect.

In the past I had been allowing outward circumstances to determine the quality of my life too much. The situation in the country (that was the time of the war in Croatia), other people's opinion of me and things like that played a great role in the way I felt. I found that to be most unsatisfactory and I realized that I would never be happy if I did not change the way I thought about life. I spent a long time thinking and searching for the right approach to happiness, until I realized that happiness is a state in which I am either in or not in. There is nothing in between. I am either traveling through life a happy man, or I am traveling through life an unhappy man with an occasional glimpse of relief and pleasure brought to me by the fact the I fulfilled a certain goal. I have to admit that meditation has been of great help to me, and I would recommend it to all those who wish to become conscious of what true happiness really is.

Throwing away all concepts about the nature of happiness that I used to hold on to until then over night was no easy task for me, but as time went by it became increasingly easy for me to embrace the idea that happiness is something that was already inside me and available to me at all times. It became increasingly easy to embrace the idea that happiness is nothing other than a question of my consciousness about what happiness is and the decision to be happy, right here right now.

Being happy is a matter of your personal decision. Make the decision. Become happy here and now. Do not wait for any conditions to be met first, because you are the one creating them, whether you are aware of them or not. Become happy and conditions for happiness will be created around you. Do not take my word for it - try it for yourself. Give yourself a break and discard the myth of happiness being like a castle that is being built gradually, and that it takes a long time to become happy.

Rest assured that, when it comes to happiness, the factor of time becomes totally relative. Being happy or not is a matter of our understanding of what happiness truly is, which is followed by our decision and choice.

Even though all this sounds very simple, it does not mean that it is easily applicable. Our minds tend to constantly return to the old habits and ways of thinking, and as soon as we make the decision to be happy, our minds keep finding the arguments to convince us that we are wrong and that we are wasting our precious time. It often points to current situations in our life whose existence should pull us away from the idea that we should become happy and tries to convince us to leave the times of happiness for a situation when the circumstances are more suitable.

Let us now get back to the title of this article: Instant happiness - is that possible?

The correct answer is: not only is it possible, but it is the only way! You are either happy, or you are not happy. There is no transitional phase.

Make an instant decision... and have a happy journey.