True happiness is a hard place to find. I think I am a reasonably happy person, but there is a difference between feeling content and pure happiness. When you are purely happy, your heart soars, your troubles melt away, and you can clearly see the true beauty in the world. Fleeting moments are possible, where the past and future do not exist and you are content with who you are and where you are in that moment. For me, I’ve discovered this occurs in three places. One, in sea of people I don’t know, completely engulfed by beautiful sounds at a live gig. Two, somewhere in nature, grass scratching my bare knees as I walk through scrub, or being carried down a mountain by snow. And three, completely concentrated on my breath in the middle of a yoga session.

It took me a while to realise the common feature between these places: anonymity. They are places without people who know us. A place where there are no expectations placed upon us about who we are, how we should act. There is no pressure to live up to the image of ourselves that we have created through our interactions with people and what they know of us. There is no pressure to attempt to present, or continue to present yourself as smart, or funny, or intriguing. You can just be.

And we need those moments of anonymity to learn how to be present in the world where people do know us. Those moments are where we learn the deepest aspects of ourselves, by demolishing the walls we’ve built and painted with an image of ‘who we are’. Often the wall is painted with constricting elements of our personality – our job, our interests, and our social status – and safely tucked behind the wall are the more delicate and true parts of our psyche. But we can only reach and harness these parts when we feel safe to break down the wall. Sometimes we need for no-one to know who we are, so we can find out for ourselves.

But surely not only anonymity is the key to happiness. There have been plenty of occasions where I have been anonymous and not happy. Those nights when you sit alone in your bedroom, watching television series after television series, mindlessly scrolling through Facebook to see all the other people that are having “better” lives than you. I am anonymous (and maybe slightly stalkerish), but definitely not happy.

So what else is there about these places that allow fleeting moments of happiness? I recently went on a volunteer trip to regional towns in South-East Queensland. The idea was to go to towns and do a bit of manual labour to help out and learn about the communities we were visiting. I spent a lot of time conflicted about whether the work we were doing was actually beneficial. Wouldn’t it have been more cost effective if the volunteers pooled the money we spent on the trip, and paid for a painter to go paint that fence, or a tiler to lay those tiles, rather than paying for 30 university students to go traipsing across the countryside, purely for the feeling of a few warm fuzzies in our stomach?

But one town changed my view on this – Moura. The people in Moura weren’t just excited for the work to be done, they were excited to have us in their township. A local, Debbie, emphasised our presence ‘recharged her batteries’ so she could continue with the wonderful work she was doing throughout the year. Seeing her emotion overflow into tears made me choke back a few of my own, and reconsider my position about the work we were doing. I realised we weren’t just doing physical work; we were making connections. We were reminding the people in the communities we visited, and ourselves, that we are part of something larger than the restrictions of our everyday lives.

It occurred to me that connectivity is part of those moments of fleeting pure happiness. As humans, we need to feel as if we belong to something and have our place in the macrocosm of life, or even just in microcosms that make up all our connections.

I remember when I was younger I used to imagine little pieces of string connecting me to everyone I knew. How loose or tight the string was represented how strong my relationship with them was. So the string between my family and me was really tight and strong, while the piece connecting me to someone I met once would be lying against the ground. I had subconsciously recognised the importance of connections through one of my childhood games, an importance that I’m only now just beginning to realise the full extent of.

There is something about being crushed in a sea of people I don’t know, mindlessly singing to a band. A sense of unity created by the shared experience of being engulfed by the music of the artist on stage. There is no need for introductions, if you know the lyrics you immediately are best friends with everyone in the audience. Your string becomes tight. It is this way that it is possible to achieve both anonymity and connectivity – and a moment of pure happiness.

The connectivity felt in nature, walking through scrub or on top of a mountain, is something entirely different, but somehow the same. It is not connectivity to humans alone, but a connection to all ecosystems around us, and realising our part in them. Watching an ant haul 100 times its own body weight along a well-worn ant highway, I realise the ant is completely oblivious to something a million times its size curiously peering over it, but I acknowledge that I have the power to end its life in a second. It highlights that we are both part of something and not. Nature has a way of operating without us – but our actions can affect massive change.

But still, by feeling the wind against our skin, the grass brushing our legs, the earth beneath our feet, we are reminded we are part of nature. There is no escaping that connection, but it is easy to forget living in our busy lives of concrete trees. Being alone and anonymous somewhere away from it all can remind us, and again we achieve anonymity and connectivity – pure happiness.

The third type of connection is within and arguably is the hardest to achieve; the connection of mind and body. It is easy to distance our thoughts from our physicality. We can get caught up in the brain in a vat theory, i.e. that our brain has invented everything around us and reality is something out of the Matrix with our brains just floating around somewhere. Or just MY brain. No one else could be real, because I have no way of perceiving anything outside myself.

But we can overcome this fear, at least temporarily, by connecting with our bodies, solely focusing on our breath. Feeling the intake and expulsion of air from our lungs reminds us to be present, here and now. This is something that only we can feel, alone. Through a yoga class, if all I can focus on is the immense struggle of my muscles working and my breath flowing, I can start to allow everything to drop away – troubles, regrets, expectations, and even my name. And thus, the connection we feel is anonymous.

Of course, these are not the only places where pure happiness can be felt, and for others pure happiness will not be felt in these places. My Mum recently said that she felt happiest when she was holding her baby in her arms for the first time. I considered at first that this debunked my theory. There was of course an immense sense of connection but Mum wasn’t alone in this moment. But I thought about it some more and realised that no, she wasn’t alone, but she was anonymous. This new born baby had no expectations of Mum, just love for the vessel who had given them the gift of life.

This may not be everyone’s path to pure happiness, but it is a few observations of how I reach that state. And hopefully making these observations makes me better prepared to reach this place more regularly.