Creating Happiness

During the past three years, I have found myself thinking a good deal about the subject of happiness and the idea of not merely desiring happiness but making its attainment my conscious purpose. This was an idea that first hit me as I approached my sixty-first birthday, and I would like to share some things I've learned.

There is a tendency for most people to explain feelings of happiness or unhappiness in terms of the external events of their lives. They explain happiness by pointing to the positives; they explain unhappiness by pointing to the negatives. The implication is that events determine whether they are happy. I have always suspected that our own attitudes have far more to do with how happy we are than any external circumstances. Today, research supports this view.

Research also tells us that the best predictors of a person's ability to be happy are self-esteem and the belief that we ourselves, rather than external forces, are most significant shapers of our destinies.

I have always thought of myself as essentially a happy person have managed to be content under some fairly difficult circumstances. However, I have known periods of suffering, as we all have, and during those times I felt that perhaps not all of the pain I was experiencing was necessary.

I began to think more about Dever's psychology. When I met her I thought that I had never met anyone for whom joy was more natural. Yet her life had not been easy. Widowed at 24, she was left to raise two small children with very little money and no one to help her. When we met, she had been single for almost 16 years, had achieved success in a number of jobs, and never spoke of past struggles with any hint of self-pity. I saw her hit by some very disappointing experiences from time to time and noticed that she would be sad or muted for a few hours (rarely no longer than a day). But then she would bounce back to her natural state of joy without any evidence of denial or repression. Her happiness was real--and larger than any adversity.

When I would ask her about her resilience, she would say, "I'm committed to being happy." And she added, "That takes self-discipline." She almost never went to sleep at night without taking time to review everything good in her life. I thought that this was important.

Then I thought of something I had noticed about myself. And that was, as I sometimes joked, that with every decade of my life my childhood kept getting rosier. If you asked me at 20 or at 60 to describe my early years, the key events would have been the same, but the emphasis would have been different. At 20, the negatives in my childgood were in the front of my mind, and the positives were at the back; at 60, the reverse was true. As I grew older, my perspective of what was important about those early years changed.

The more I thought about other happy people, the clearer it became that happy people process their experiences so that, as quickly as possible, positives are held in the foreground of consciousness and negatives are held in the background.

But then I was stopped by this thought: none of these ideas was entirely new to me; at some level they were familiar. So why had I not implemented them better throughout my life? Once I aked the question, I knew the answer: somehow long ago I had decided that if I did not spend a significant amount of time focused on the negatives of my life, the disappointments and setbacks, I was avoiding reality. Expressing this thought in word for the first time, I saw how absurd it was. It would be reasonable only if there were corrective actions I could be taking that I was avoiding. But if I was taking every action possible, then a further focus on negatives had no merit at all.

If something is wrong in one's life, the question to ask is: is there an action I can take to improve or correct the situation? If there is, I should take it. If there isn't, I should do my best not to torment myself about what is beyond my control.

The past two and a half years of my life have been among my happiest, even though is has been a time of considerable external stress. I deal with problems more quickly than in the past, and I recover more quickly from disappointments.

One of the best ways to implement these ideas about happiness is to begin or end each day with two questions: What's good in my life? and What needs to be done? The first question keeps us focused on the positives. The second reminds us that our well-being is our own responsibility.

The world has rarely treated happiness as a state worthy of serious respect. And yet, if we see someone who, in spite of life's adversities, is happy a good deal of the time, we should recognize that we are looking at a spiritual achievement--and one worth aspiring to.

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© 1997-2004 Wild Angel

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