A while ago Rowan Simpson got me thinking about the key to happiness. His keys to success:

• losing a lot and starting again
• having low expectations for happiness

That sounds very depressing doesn’t it?

Until you see all these miserable people walking around who really have no issues at all, and have compensate by inventing them or throwing life out of proportion.

The downside to being human is that we rarely learn to appreciate what we have and we’d rather complain than rejoice.

Which means it is only the people who have actually suffered who realise that to be sad is not in fact fun, it is just sad. Sadness doesn’t equate to the ability to feel things more deeply or a higher level of complexity, it, in the large part, is simply a matter of laziness.

Basically people who have experienced hardship appreciate the ability to be happy, take delight in simple pleasures and have very little time to spend worrying about the mundane issues that plague most of us.

Who would have thought the key to happiness would be despair? But now I think about it, it makes perfect sense.