My name is Abel Salazar and I am from the North of Mexico. I want to share with you my experience of watching the documentary “The Happy Movie”. While watching it, you laugh, cry and learn many things about life. Everyone in this world aspires to be happy but sometimes we may lose ourselves in the search for it.
Who could define happiness? Or how can we get happiness? These are questions that sound easy to be resolved, but in reality they are very hard to answer. The documentary helps us to find some clues. Last Friday, February 1st, members of WYA, and the coordinators in Latin America met to watch an interesting documentary. I had the opportunity of attending this meeting, which helped all of us since we exchanged points of views and learned about happiness among people from different parts of Mexico and from other countries in Latin America.
Talking about this highly recommendable documentary, it helps to clarify the vision of what happiness really is. Sometimes we buy a car or a house, or an iPod, a computer, or any other material object hoping it will increase our happiness. But, with the documentary, I realized that happiness is not something you can easily buy, but it can be given through someone else. It became clearer for me through a metaphor someone shared: happiness is like when it rains and you put your hands together to catch the raindrops and they start filling with water with some difficulty, I think happiness is like this, because despite having many ways to get it, many drops can get away as many moments of happiness that get away, not because we want it that way but because it simply happens.
I learned that happiness comes more easily to people living detached from material things, and that sometimes people in developed countries find it harder to achieve.
Several examples were shown about how happiness is originated and developed within family. For it is in the family that you learn to have fun, play, and develop relationships with people who are different to you, in other words, within the family you learn to respect others and to know yourself as a person and therefore to respect your dignity.
It would be a nice idea if every person could make a list of the things, people or circumstances which make them happy and which ones don’t, and then maybe publish it on a social media website to share it with others. Although that could become a very difficult task, to define “what makes me happy?” or “how can I reach happiness”, these are questions that will be somehow solved during our lives. Today, however, I want to give you a clue. You will find happiness in the small things, in the most ordinary moments of your life, in the conversation between classes with your classmates, on Sundays with your cousins and family, going to the movies with your friends, all together in the memories and anecdotes that you build every day. That is why it is very important that we act always with coherence and congruence, so that every moment you live may be a nice memory.
I hope another WYA activity can be carried out soon, because I met many people with whom I could identify myself and spent one of those evenings that I will remember, and that when I think of it in the future, I will feel very happy of having been there instead of someplace else. It felt like being with family. I certainly recommend going to the activities organized by WYA. They are really enjoyable.
Remember, being happy has no economic price.
By Abel Salazar Acosta, WYA member from Mexico.
