Happiness is simply “happiness”

People are often busy looking for happiness in distant things, in the laughter of others, in success, in fame, or in a photo that gets a lot of likes on social networks.

Personally, I used to think that happiness was something abstract, out of reach, even though I had written hundreds of essays about it. I worked hard to paint beautiful, grandiose words about that emotion, but every time I finished writing, my heart was still strangely empty. Happiness, to me back then, was both everything and nothing.

I live in a peaceful countryside, where in the morning I hear the rooster crowing, in the afternoon I hear the children calling each other in the yard. Everything seems to be nothing special, just the same peaceful days that sometimes seem… bland. I live a closed life, talk little, only hanging around a few relatives, with the small roads around my house, with afternoons sitting watching the sunlight fall through the leaves. Just like that, each day passes by, neither sad nor happy.

Until I realized, the things I once thought "would always be there" were slowly slipping away.

When I was little, I often went to the neighborhood to play with Ri, Pha, Lo, Bon,... A group of mischievous but extremely close children. Every sunny afternoon, we would invite each other to the yard to play tag, play chi chi chan chan, play "stone"... laughing loudly throughout the small neighborhood. But now, I can't even remember what their voices sounded like, and when we passed each other, we only exchanged a few words.

When I was little, I loved the feeling of sitting on a wheelbarrow, being pushed around the yard by my grandfather. He often said, "My grandson is so cool!", then laughed heartily. I would raise my hands to the sky, feeling like I was galloping on horseback. But now, that wheelbarrow lies quietly in the backyard, rusted and worn out beyond recognition, I myself can no longer fit in it, and my grandfather... has become a part of the memories of two years ago.

When I was a child, in front of my house there was a big jujube tree with a wide canopy, and in the summer the fruit was bright red, covering the corner of the garden. Every season, the whole neighborhood would gather, some picking, some laughing, some rubbing jujube seeds on each other's clothes to keep them clean, but strangely, in the end, no one's clothes were clean. The sour taste on the tip of the tongue, the sticky feeling on the hands, the musty smell of jujube leaves that day, all are still intact in my memory. It's just that now, those faces have changed, everyone's clothes are still flat and neat, but their smiles are no longer as carefree as before.

“When I was a child”… those two words sound both sweet and bitter. Every time I mention them, I get a choked up feeling in my throat. Is it because I was so happy back then that I didn’t know it, or is it because now, I can no longer feel the same happiness as before?

I don’t know. I just know that the older we get, the easier it is to forget how to be happy. We are so busy that we forget the feeling of a leisurely afternoon, forget the sound of laughter, forget to look up at the blue sky. “Why are people so easily sad?”…

Then, in the chilly morning of my hometown, when the sunlight gently filtered through the leaves, shining lightly on the mossy tiled roof, I suddenly felt a warmth in my heart that was hard to name. Perhaps, happiness is something like that… suddenly realizing in a moment that quietly follows us all our lives, never far away, it’s just that we forget to look back.

I was born in a place where the silhouette of the Perfume River or Ngu Mountain is not clearly visible, there are only fields stretching to the horizon, red dirt roads leading to green bamboo banks and the sound of roosters crowing to wake up in the morning. Life there is very simple! In the afternoons when the golden sunset falls, my father herds the chickens into the coop, my mother sits picking vegetables,... Yet, every time I remember, my heart feels warm, loving, and extremely grateful.

There was a time when I thought happiness had to be something big, like achieving my dreams, having a lot of money, or traveling to faraway lands, etc. But then I realized, happiness is simply "happiness", it's not something to be found, but something waiting for us to realize.

It lies perfectly in the hot bowl of rice mother pours with fish sauce and ginger, in the reassuring look of father when his child comes home early, in the sound of friends calling each other on the windy country road,...

Happiness to me has never been lost, it just quietly nestles on the porch, among the little things that we accidentally forget.

Just slow down once, listen to the sound of the wind, the smell of new straw, the laughter of someone dear to us and we will see that happiness is always here - simple, gentle and contained in the word "hello"!

Nguyen Ngoc Han

Source: https://baodongnai.com.vn/van-hoa/202510/hanh-phuc-chi-don-gian-la-hanh-phuc-thoi-46a1034/