Come essere felici ogni singolo giorno. How to be happy every single day.

Yesterday I watched this inspiring TedTalk video about happiness. I want to share it with you to both practice your Italian and to help you reflect. Feel free to use the Italian automatically generated subtitles (but be warned – there are mistakes) or use the ‘auto-translate’ to English feature (which will also surely have mistakes.) It’s good listening practice either way!

Here are some vocabulary words that I noted:

girovagare – to wander

il percorso – journey

una ragion d’essere – reason for being (ikigai in Japanese!)

consapevole – conscious

storto – crooked, misguided

ignoto – unknown

taccuino – notepad

Un animale in gabbia – a caged animal

Some good advice from Gianluca: 

He talked about this Japanese idea of ikigai, or your reason for being. It is an intersection of four aspects: ciò che ami fare, ciò che sai fare, ciò che puoi condividere con gli altri, ciò che puoi fare per mantenerti. That which you love to do, what you know how to do, what you can do to share with others, and that which you can do to maintain yourself financially. Once you find something that intersects between all of these things, you find your felicità, happiness.

Smettere di essere passeggeri, invece diventare piloti della propria vita. Stop being passengers, instead become pilots of your own life.

Dovreste modellare il vostro tempo sulla forma della vostra felicità, qualunque esse sia. You should model your time based upon your happiness, whatever it may be. The answer for everyone is unique only to them, and Gianluca explained that by giving many examples of the unique percorsi, journeys, of the people he has met.

Allora, vi chiedo, che fate voi per essere felici ogni singolo giorno? So, I ask you all, what do you do to be happy every single day?