Happiness: Can You Just Feel It?

Have you ever met a person for the first time and knew immediately, even before a ‘hello’ was spoken, you would become friends? I felt that way about Hanna Fitsner whom I met in Lake Como, Italy, where I attended a Bliss Champion retreat.

My last blog, “How to Find Happiness via One Italian’s Advice” was based on a conversation I had with her husband Pietro. Together they own Best Como Real Estate and sell and rent properties around beautiful Lake Como. 

On our first amazingly clear, warm morning at the lake, Hanna and I were out very early in the morning sipping coffee and listening to the awakening sounds and enjoying the slow, warm, sunrise. 

We got to know each other very well that morning talking and laughing about our families, life work, adventures, and how we got to this particular place at this particular time. 

Hanna, like me, wanted to be a journalist and as happens to many of us due to life circumstances we both let go of that dream when we were young. I, because of lack of money to finance my attending journalism school, and she, due to other obligations. 

Now, later in our lives, here we are, doing what we loved to do as young girls. She is writing articles for travel magazines and I’m a published author and write weekly blogs. 

This is why whenever people are lost in their lives and searching for happiness, I point them in the direction of what it was they loved to do when they were young. Hanna and I both loved to write and life circumstances took us in other directions. And here we are, both fulfilling our childhood dreams. 

Hanna left me with one comment that I am reflecting on and is so very true that I’ve taken action on it. 

We were talking on the final evening before I headed home about the experience we had that week at the retreat. She said, “You (Americans) talk a lot about happiness, we just feel it.”

Because of Hanna, I am feeling a lot more and honoring and acknowledging those feelings as they come up. Somehow I am happier because I am more aware of and present to those feelings. 

I’m just feeling it. 

How do you feel your happiness?