Well, hello!

I’d like to start off my new season of posts with some thoughtful ones on a topic I think about quite a lot. It’s mental health!

Now I know that the tone of this blog might get you to think otherwise (after all there is a link at the top of the page that says “blurry dog hat”). But actually I am quite a thoughtful person. Mental health is obviously really important to people’s lives, but quite often we overlook it. If we’re ill, we go to the doctor, take some medication, do something about it, but if we have poor mental health, we often don’t know what to do, or we can even be completely unaware of it.

Maybe that’s because “mental health” is a scary word. Or maybe it’s because we don’t think of it as “mental health”, for the most part. In this modern world of analysing everything and giving it a world, “mental health” is just another name for “happiness”. And most of us are searching for happiness, are we not?

Happiness is one of those concepts like “success” that everyone recognises, but no-one can quite put into words in a way that describes it once and for all. Since people have been thinking about them for so long, and there are still no answers, we can probably conclude that no-one will ever come up with an exhaustive description of what happiness (or success, or forgiveness, or love, or faith, etc) actually is.

I have found that it is helpful to think of these concepts as people that you get to know. It would be impossible to fully capture who I am in a sentence or two. You might describe my appearance, or location, or go over a potted history of my life, but it’s not likely that you will capture all of who I am.

It’s the same with happiness. Don’t waste time trying to figure out what it will take to make you happy, before you get happy. Just get to know happiness like you would a friend. Learn along the way.

So there’s going to be a series of posts about happiness/mental health, and some of the things I’ve learnt that help keep my mental health ticking over nicely. I hope you find them helpful!