If you can't live happily in your moment, live happily in someone else's.

The other day I saw a meme that urged us to be happy right now, in the moment because life is the moment, and so on. A person was walking with flowers in her hand. 

My first thought was that if all it took to pivot and be happy right now was a meme's advice, why would we be any other way? Nobody doesn’t wish they were happy and it's simple to suggest that it’s simple. 

And then I thought about it all day.

People post things all the time that are so obvious to some as to be banal, while others may find sweet perspective that they've been craving in that simple string of words, and you know what I should do about that? 

Seize the opportunity to shut up, as my psychology professor advised us in child development.

I take happiness seriously. Everyone should.  And, the first thing to know about happiness is that it is not another word for mood.

If you are inclined to be happy, it is a drive that steers you, day in and day out, toward bigger life outside of yourself where you can test your expectation that good things will probably happen. Happy people tend to have that in common, an interest in the lives around them, even if they themselves are recovering from a slip and fall on the here and now.

Not-happy people, on the other hand, just want everything they're doing to be done and don't really notice or care about what other people do. They disagree and they take offense for the sake of it, like they didn’t get invited to something they wouldn’t have gone to anyway.

I thought about happiness a lot last week when a string of unrelated bad things happened to different people in my community. Things from which I think I'd maybe not recover, but know others will have to, who live in houses I can almost see from here.

This is the tails to the heads of the happiness coin. As lives outside of your own can inspire and energize you, so will they depress and immobilize you from time to time, and that is when you might need to go somewhere and see other lives that are happening as well, for balance.

In our rural, socioeconomic mongrel of a town, we have a medium size supermarket that serves all of us, on every walk of life between the locals and the newcomers, the wealthy and the barely getting by, groomed professionals and raggedy ones, teens, the elderly, young parents with a lot of babies, young married people with "dogs for now."

There are always things worth looking at for a little longer than usual at this place.

It might be a group of wry, cool millennials making hilarious observations about something, because millennials do this like the rest of us walk around and breathe.

It might see a clutch of very elderly people in the parking lot laughing at each other's stories. 

Or someone embracing his minimum wage job with cheer and pride.

Or a worn-out parent, being further worn-out right in front of you by her worn-out children but who still musters the patience to say calmly, “No, you can’t have that, we already talked about it.”

You might see content older couples who listen carefully to each other, or content young children who sing and can’t be still, or content other people who study boxes of cereal like they're picking a paint color for their house.  

I write a lot about change – conceiving it, making it happen, and celebrating it. But today, I’m thinking of happiness, and the joy of living in the moment as we are, when we can. And I'm thinking of other times, when we must live close to the lives of others, and accept the sweet perspective we've been craving when the moment hands it to you.

If you're the happy type, that is.