It’s a challenge set out to see if you could be happy for 100 days straight – sounds easy enough right?  Well, as it turns out over 70% of people who take on this challenge to post a picture everyday of one thing that makes them happy, fail. Most say that they are just too busy to commit.

Well I have to say as of May 26, 2014, my 23rd birthday and 100th day of this challenge, I wasn’t too busy to stop and smell the roses.  I challenged myself at a time when the word “busy” was just an understatement in my life.  My days were solidly packed between school, work, an internship and trying to find time to sleep and eat.

Whether it was food (which seemed to make me happy more than it should have) spending time with friends and family or simply just being present, aware and observant of the world around me I found something to be happy about for 100 days straight (That’s pretty freakin’ cool in my book).

This challenge while a fun plug on social media to practice your amateur photography skills proved to me that “busy” is a word I need to eradicate from my vocabulary.  Everyone is busy nowadays and I don’t want to be plain old busy.  I want to be balanced.  I want the work that I do at my job and in school to be balanced by the enjoyment of getting coffee with a friend, exploring the waterfront downtown, or just sitting on my porch watching a robin feed her little babes.

When I think of what got me through this past semester where I really added more to my plate than I could handle, it was balancing all of that with a single moment everyday – one single moment to appreciate and cherish, one that makes you look back on your day and say that it was another day well-lived. The best part in not failing was that I built a habit everyday of finding something that made me happy and if I was having a rough day, which happened only a few times throughout the past several weeks, I tried to make myself happy, by meeting up with a friend or treating myself to something that puts a smile on my face.

And that right there is the key of the past 100 happy days: Appreciate what makes you happy. It doesn’t have to be something big.  I found that what I posted were just blips of time throughout my day, but they were blips that added up to something spectacular.  You learn to cherish what makes you happy and that in turn gives you a thirst that everyday you wake up you want to be happy.  It may sound weird, who doesn’t want to be happy? But there are those days where one thing goes wrong and we are ready to throw our hands in the air and get lost in a television show or a bowl of ice cream – and trust me TV and ice cream make me a very happy man.

But it’s more than just finding comfort in misery, it is about finding elation in mystery.  Everyday is a new chance to experience something new, different, scary and fulfilling.  You never know what the day has in store for you.  Happiness can be waiting to fall in your lap or you may have to go searching.  Either way, I now have a desire to wake up everyday determined to go to sleep that night with a smile on my face and a memory forever etched onto my soul.

So do you know what makes you happy?  Go find it. I dare you.