Life. Seasoned with perspective.
What really makes a person happy? Is it comfort, adventure, or something we cannot name? The answer might be closer and simpler than we think.
Another birthday is almost here. And with it come the usual questions.
- Am I living fully?
- Could I have done better?
- Am I happy? The list runs on and on.
Birthdays have a way of slowing you down. They nudge you into reflection that can be both gentle and brutal. You start to sift through memories, victories, mistakes, and the quiet hopes still tucked away.
Let me begin somewhere.
Every so often I travel back to Ekedoli in Vihiga County, my birth village. I can’t claim a deep attachment, but roots matter. I hardly know many people there, yet I never skip a stop at the home of an elderly woman called Esteri — a local twist on Esther. My siblings and I hold her family in high regard, so every trip home includes a small gift of ‘sugar’ and a warm hello.
Esteri is in her seventies but walks tall and straight. You might mistake her for someone in her fifties. She knows little of diet plans or skincare trends and couldn’t care less. What stands out is her laughter: deep, hearty, and honest. Despite the years and hardships, she radiates contentment.
Her joy is a quiet kind of defiance. Life in a rural village isn’t easy. Water must be fetched, fields tended. Yet she carries a lightness I sometimes envy.
So why do many of us, blessed with far more, still feel a quiet emptiness?
Let me shift to my brother, Tim.
One day he was working in Nairobi. The next, he packed up and went home. “I need to breathe again,” he said. I know friends who have done the same, leaving the city grind to start afresh. And they are thriving.
Tim began from scratch. Our once silent family compound now brims with life. His wife and children glow with a calm joy. Nearly everything we eat when we visit comes straight from his farm. Watching him, I see the fulfillment that comes from building a life that feeds both body and spirit.
It isn’t the absence of challenges that makes him happy. Farming is hard work. Village life can be isolating. But there is something about shaping a life with your own hands, about seeing tangible results, that softens the edges of each day.
So what is happiness, really?
I am learning it hides in small things: the morning air after a night of rain, a shared meal, the courage to make a hard change when your heart demands it. Happiness often grows from brave steps that don’t look grand on the outside.
I’ve seen friends find it in unexpected ways — in community projects, in starting a tiny business, in long evening walks. None of it makes headlines, but it changes lives.
A friend once tweeted something that stayed with me: everyone needs a “third place.” Work and home are obvious. That third space keeps us grounded and shields us from the quiet creep of depression. It could be a church, a gym, a hiking group. Any healthy community where you feel alive and accepted.
So I ask you: what is your third place? Where do you go to breathe, to feel seen, to remember who you are outside the roles you play?
Here’s what I’m learning as another birthday nears: happiness is rarely about the next big milestone. It lives in the ordinary moments we often rush past. It lives in laughter like Esteri’s, in a garden full of fresh food, in the quiet choice to start over.
Maybe happiness isn’t something we chase.
Maybe it’s something we practise.
A daily decision to notice what is already good.
A daily choice to create more of it.
That’s the lesson I carry into this next year of life: joy isn’t waiting out there. It is right here, if we are willing to pause, breathe, and claim it. One ordinary, extraordinary moment at a time.
About the Author
Kibisu Mulanda is a media executive and strategic communicator with over 20 years of experience in television, NGO storytelling, and youth-focused content. He is the Acting Head of Switch Media Ltd and teaches media at the Kenya Institute of Mass Communication (KIMC). A Certified SIYB Trainer, he blends storytelling with strategy to drive social impact.
About the Author
