Daily Prompt – December 21, 2025

This is very thought provoking. I think this is probably the best prompt yet.

Happiness is a tricky thing. Are we talking about joy or contentment or amusement or excitement? There are many types of happiness. Most of us don’t dissect our emotions like that but I do. I like using the right word to define the emotion as clearly as possible. It’s a thing that makes me feel I am communicating complexity clearly.

I think for me the happiest of happy emotions is when I feel content. When I am able to take the moment to not feel any stress or anxiety or urgency behind the feeling. For me, this often comes in my early mornings. Typically when I’m answering these prompts.

I get to sit on my couch and enjoy the sunrise out my living room windows. Beautiful pastel purples, pinks, and yellows today. All filtered through a forest of trees, branches, and leaves as we live on a nature preserve in Florida. I love that even in winter, theres so much green. The air is still and the world is quiet. It is peaceful and restorative. A perfect way to start a day. It often makes it hard to get up and start working. Fortunately for me, I work from home at least a few days a week and I work from out on our lanai so I can enjoy the same scenery there too.

These moments make me happiest because they are pure. There is no expectations. There is just me enjoying a moment for myself. No social contract to remember. No one else’s needs to account for or emotions to balance against. Just time to absorb the quiet and the serenity that life can offer. I feel similar when I can get to a beach and enjoy the waves, especially at sunset. But that is public and harder to ignore the people around me to just breathe and ground myself. So while the beach or the ocean in general (cruising is great) will always be my happy place and a place I run to when I need to recharge. These quiet moments on my couch in the early mornings are when I can honestly say I am the most happy.