Delivering Happiness

part of my life is because of its versatility and ability to adapt to
almost any situation.
Red Bull has been my faithful companion almost everywhere I
go, no matter what activity I’m doing, including drinking at bars,
watching movies, working in the office, and hiking in the mountains.
In fact, I’m sipping a Red Bull as I’m writing this and sitting next to

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my writing friends who are having trouble comprehending why I
would feel compelled to write about my relationship with Red Bull.
I guess at the end of the day, my thought is that it’s pretty hard to
find a good companion that’s compatible with so many parts of your
life and is always there to support you along the way. If you’re able
to find a companion that you wouldn’t mind accompanying you to
breakfast and to dinner, that helps you get through your post-lunch
food coma at the office as well as your final miles in a marathon, and
that you can enjoy with or without alcohol—that’s a pretty rare thing
to come across.
To me, that’s a relationship worth keeping.
Connectedness
My birthday party was coming up, and I wanted to make sure that it was
unlike any birthday party I had ever thrown before. I had decided to go all-
out for it.
A few months earlier, I’d reconnected with some friends from high
school, and similar to my college days, a core group of about fifteen of us
formed and we started hanging out with each other several times a week. In
the beginning, it wasn’t purposeful or planned. It was just a by-product of
the fact that there were already so many of us living in the same building,
so impromptu gatherings became more and more common.
Sometimes we would hang out in someone’s loft, and other times we
would all plan on going to a nightclub or rave together. Slowly, we grew
our community, and our building became the hub for not only our own
friends but also friends of our friends. Without realizing it, we’d created and
developed our own tribe, and the most common meeting point became the
loft that I lived in.
As our group grew, I realized that forming new friendships and
deepening the connections within our burgeoning tribe was bringing both a
sense of stability and a sense of excitement about the future for all of us.
The connectedness we felt was making all of us happier, and we realized

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that it was something that we had all missed from our college days. It was
something that, like many people, we had unwittingly lost upon graduating
from college, and we didn’t realize how much we missed it until we
accidentally recreated it for ourselves.
I made a note to myself to make sure I never lost sight of the value of a
tribe where people truly felt connected and cared about the well-being of
one another. To me, connectedness—the number and depth of my
relationships—was an important element of my happiness, and I was
grateful for our tribe. The purpose of my big birthday party coming up
wasn’t actually meant to focus on me. My birthday was just the excuse. The