I do believe that happiness is a choice. Everyday we get up and make decisions-- some conscious and some less so. We can choose to let the world blow us around like a piece of scrap paper in the wind or we can decide how we will react to our situation and react with consciousness and determined choice.
We don't always have control over our circumstance but we do have a choice about our attitude and how we act in response.
I wish I could practice this with absolute perfection and say that I have this down. I don't. But I do work on practicing it. Somedays I do better than others. I read a book once entitled, How We Choose To Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People. It was written by Rick Foster and Greg Hicks and their website is at: www.choosetobehappy.com/. I highly recommend the book as a place to begin thinking about life satisfaction and it dovetails nicely with many different meditative and religious practices. For the book they interviewed people in various communities that were identified by other people as always being happy. They looked at their interviews and analyzed them for themes and decided there were nine actions/qualities that the very happy people exhibited. The nine choices were: intention, accountability, identification, centrality, recasting, options, appreciation, giving, and truthfulness.
I have a friend named Matt who is always upbeat. I ran this idea of happiness as a choice by him. He just kind of shrugged, smiled, and said that of course it was a choice.
Today I am going to think on these nine choices. Also, I am working on a fantasy short story. Woohoo!
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"Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it." - Mark Twain
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Thanks for posting Terry. I think I am going to pick one of each of these nine choices and elaborate on it. I agree that dwelling on the sad and troubling stuff doesn't really help.
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