Finding Happiness

Isn’t it delightful when you happen upon a discovery, person, or situation that just makes your insides smile even broader than your face? I would call that “finding happiness.”

That’s great! But if you are depending on that kind of happenstance to color your world, you might as well make a career of buying Lotto tickets instead of working for a living. Yes, you could hit the jackpot, but more likely you’ll end up homeless, hungry, dirty, and depressed.

I think it might be our obligation to create rather than seek happiness. True, we all go through those periods, some of them quite extended, when we just can’t seem to make it happen. We are moping around, hoping for an external kick-start. Friends can be pretty good at that. But sometimes we find ourselves alone, tired of calling on our friends, worried that they must be feeling we are dragging them down with our lethargic dependence.

Yeah. It can get tough. We can become morose.

I don’t know why my friends put up with me. They already believe I am insane because of my views on how to live a healthy life. Some of them are retired nurses whose training conflicts directly with my views, which are primarily naturopathic.

As a teen in New England, I discovered that, except in extreme conditions, I could choose not to be cold. I gathered the energy around me and imagined my spine was a hot glowing column of iron radiating heat throughout my body. It worked. Likewise, I discovered that being healthy was a personal choice, that I could choose not to get sick, not to succumb to whatever the variant of Creeping Crud was going around. It involved a few healthy habits like sensible toothbrushing and handwashing, daily showering and frequent shampooing, not putting foreign objects in my mouth, not eating after other people, never biting my nails, avoiding synthetic foods, and taking high quality vitamin and mineral supplements instead of pharmaceuticals. There is a time and place for antibiotics, but don’t over use them and remember to replenish your gut flora as soon as you finish taking the full course.

I didn’t mean to get off on the health tangent, but this has worked for me for decades. I’ve not had any version of Flu since 1958, and I’ve had only one Flu shot in my life (at work) in 1977. I didn’t know any better back then.

So, if keeping warm in the cold, and keeping healthy in a world teaming with sick people can be done through natural choice, being happy should be, too! Shouldn’t it? After all, that is part of mental health.

What do they say? “Maintain an attitude of gratitude.”

Creating happiness will not make you a person who walks around constantly chuckling and giggling to yourself. Joy is part of happiness, but I think the baseline is simple optimism. We can choose to expect an upturn, or we can choose to be buried in the currently disappointing condition. In the meantime, instead of sucking the joy out of others, we can employ the Three-foot Rule to spread joy, hope, or a silly story to those around us.

Haven’t you found that happiness, and even love, are most often found when you are giving them away freely?

Life is a choice. It’s not perfect. We’re not perfect. But we can choose to aspire to the best possibility.