Walking for Happiness: Transform Your Life One Step at a Time

Promoting happiness means guiding people towards choices that contribute to well-being for themselves and others. We do this by spreading the art of walking, which enables us to experience all four fundamental forms of well-being and satisfaction that belong to human nature:

1. immediate pleasure, which is connected to the stimulation of our five senses and manifests itself in a pleasant physiological reaction that involves us completely
2. happiness that manifests itself in feeling at peace with ourselves and with life
3. happiness that is found in the process of expressing our own abilities through action and is realised through work, art, a hobby, study or a craft
4. happiness that has love, in all its forms, as its most gratifying source.

To realise our full potential, all four of these areas deserve proper space in a person's life, which specifically means:

• allowing ourselves moments of daily fulfilment through music, food, scents, nature and anything that creates harmless gratification by directly stimulating serotonin production; sometimes these pleasures benefit from periods of abstinence to be fully appreciated (in moderation)

• developing our own autonomy and therefore our relationship with ourselves, managing to express as much free choice as possible, independent and integrated with our own identity, unbound or predetermined by external conditions; feeling moreover that from this freedom emerges a more authentic emotion towards life, because we are aware of who we are

• expressing ourselves through action and therefore through an activity aimed at creating a product, studying, acquiring skills, developing professionally and growing within work contexts, but also as a hobby or volunteer work; engaging our creativity, training our talents, and expanding our intellectual faculties

• building meaningful relationships, within family, in love and friendship, in collaborative ventures and communities, cultivating feelings of sisterhood and brotherhood, valuing sharing and exchange; restoring to conviviality and social connection their rightful place, freeing them from conventions and exploitation, while recovering spontaneity and humanity

For these areas, the law of compensation cannot apply: full satisfaction in one area does not resolve, in the long term, frustration in another; they must all find their own space.

They are not, moreover, comparable to human physiological needs; they require an additional effort: one can live without satisfying one's desires for happiness, with the only consequences being inner discomfort and suffering. The choice is yours.