Happiest Days of Our Life

‘You never know the happiest days of your life when you are living them. To know they are the happiest, you have to make a comparison with other, less happy times and you can only do that by stepping back from them.’

I was really intrigued by the statement above when I stumbled upon it while I was reading a book entitled ‘Extraordinary Solutions for Everyday Problems’ by Joseph O’ Connor. It is a very interesting book to read. Although the contents are a little bit technical, but the main ideas are easy to be dissected if we look at the bigger picture of what are being said in the book.

This is the book. Actually, I have not finished reading this book.

Okay, let us get back to the statement above. When I thought back about what lies behind those sentences, I found the truth in it. It is true that most of us only appreciate happy times that we had been in when we are no longer experiencing them, although we did not consider them as happy times before while we were experiencing them. Only then when we experience difficult situations, we start to reminisce, appreciate and look back at past experiences that we had been in before. Then, the phrases such as ‘if I were able to go back the past and experience those sweet moments once again’ or ‘I never thought that those times were much better than what I am having now’ will start to linger in our mind.

To me, it is necessary for us to remember and reminisce the past because we can learn and gain knowledge from it as experience is one of the best teachers. Try to learn something out of it. Most importantly, appreciate those past moments as you might not be able to experience them again the way they were. 

One of my happiest days in matriculation.