How to be happy when you "wanted to" but couldn’t?

How to stay happy even when you couldn’t do something you loved to?

We all crave a lifestyle in which we are able and permitted to do as we wish all time. 

You surely have three lists: 

1. Things that you love to do
2. Things that you hate to do
3. Things that do not impact you

If you design your life then you would try to include everything from list 1 and nothing from list 2 and a random selection from list 3 which changes according to your varying mood.

However, you belong to a complex system and you don’t have the ability to create such a design (not yet). In reality, you become sad if you miss out to do certain things from list 1 or if you are forced to stick to things from list 2. That’s called the design constraint.

Your three personal lists contain a lot of items and the number may be correlated to your level of creativity. Your life is boring if it is only your list 3 that has all the items because you’ll hardly know what to do in you leisure. You must know yourself; know how the different things you do, impact you. This is the number-of-items constraint.

There is a universal constraint that does not demand much of explanation - the time constraint. You know you can’t do everything, mostly indirectly due to lack of time. You can almost do anything if you had unlimited time. 

Considering so many constraints, are you forced to pick from list 2 alone?

In such a case, do you find all the colours in your life fade away? Is all you enjoy in life “nothing”? How often do you wake up in the morning only to curse the day?

Here’s how to solve it:

• The constraints don’t deny you the chance to pick from list 1 when circumstances enforce on you the list 2. Maybe you are forced to pick the majority from list 2 but you may add a few from list 1 too to your to-do list.
• Use your creative ingredients to transfer items from list 3 to list 1.
• Never let your list 1 be empty at any point of your life.

Even when you couldn’t do the thing you loved to, you can always find happiness if you could just figure out what else you could do to lift your spirits.