It is said that we all want happiness and joy in our lives. Yet, most of us seem to spend most of their time feeling somehow bad, in some negative emotions.
Why is that? Well, I think one of the reasons is that most of us are looking for happiness in wrong places.
Happiness Is Not Outside of Us
Many of us feel that happiness is something that is outside of us, meaning that we think that when we get that something, we’ll feel happy: “When I get that new car, when I get that new job, when I have that new relationship in my life – or whatever – then I will be happy.”
The thing with those things is also that they are things that can disappear from our lives. I mean, cars break down and houses might demolish within time. So might also the relationships. We might find out that that person was not the right one for me after all.
What I mean is that happiness is really a choice.
Happiness Is a Choice
It’s a choice of how we choose to feel about things. We can look at the world and experience the world through a different lens. You can look at things happily and do things happily. And when you do things happily, you feel happy.
It has a lot to do with what we pay attention to. Do we pay attention to what is wrong? Or do we pay attention to what is good in our life? Do we focus on the problem (“Oh man, this is a problem and I feel bad when I think about that problem.”) or do we think about the solution?
So it is more the way how we look at things and have that internal feeling, choosing to be happy, choosing to look at things through a happy lens.
Now, I know that a lot of people reading this blog post will think, “Come on, that’s not possible.”
Yes, there are things that make us feel bad, but those are also choices. If something “bad” happens to us, we can choose to feel bad about what has happened, or we can look at the bright side of things. We’ve all heard that, “Look at the bright side of that.”
Even if we think about something like a person near and dear to us has passed away. Are we feeling bad and sad about losing that person? Or are we rather recalling all those great fun times that we had and all the joy that we shared together?
It is a choice. I know this can sound brutal to some, but yet, I still do claim that happiness is a choice. It’s an internal feeling that we choose to have.
Words of Wisdom
In my book, Words of Wisdom, chapter nine is about happiness. And, like all chapters in the book, there’s a lot of brilliant quotes from wise people on this topic, and this time I would like to share a quote from my book that is from Dr. David Hawkins:
So, like Dr. Hawkings says, joy, pleasure, and happiness are always available for us. But if we choose to look at whatever payoffs we might get from feeling bad, there’s some sort of a sick kind of benefit of feeling bad about something. And that’s our ego basically telling us that this payoff from the bad feeling is worth keeping.
But if we skip that, if we look through that, and really realize that joy, happiness, and pleasure are always available for us if we choose so, then what do you choose?
What kind of life do you choose? What kind of actions and behaviors do you do when you choose to do them from the state of happiness and joy?
It is a choice. Although you might not always feel that way, it is a choice.
