Happiness

There's something in the air, and has been for a few years now - ever since positive psychology took off. The idea behind positive psychology, in a nut shell, is that instead of focusing the efforts of the psychology industry on unhappiness (with all of the accompanying names and symptoms) and how to fix it, they should instead be focusing their efforts on studying happiness and how to achieve it. Slightly different focus, widely different results.

I too have been quite interested in happiness. My mother tells me that when I was seven, and she was standing in the laundry room ironing, I came down and asked her if it didn't bother her that she would die one day, and no one would ever know that she had been here; that she would never be a Mozart or an Einstein, and just not be remembered. Her interpretation of that incident was that I was brilliant, since she had never had such deep thoughts in her life. My interpretation is that even at seven I was already painfully aware of the pointlessness of everything - everything being accomplishing something significant and justifying your consumption of oxygen. Over the years, I have come to reconcile my failure as a success with my continued existence, but I still read books about happiness hoping to find that one little sentence which changes my life and finally makes me happy.

Well, to save you the bother of years of reading some quite interesting books, here's the sentence - from OSHO's Joy The Happiness That Comes from Within:
Human beings can be tremendously happy and tremendously unhappy -- and they are free to choose.
OSHO has very kindly written this sentence in the forward of the book, either saving you from reading, or allowing you to read the rest of the book for further discussion. But essentially, we choose to be unhappy. Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis ends up more or less at the same point after exploring all of the major theories of happiness from the last 2000 years - We are more or less as happy as we choose to be.

This doesn't let us off the hook from Being though - we can't just sit in the muck and smile. But - fat or thin, rich or poor, as long as I am not actively being tortured or otherwise suffering, I can control my attitude. I'd rather be 20 pounds lighter, 2 inches taller, $500,000 wealthier, 10 IQ points more intelligent, and play the piano exquisitely now, but, fairly fresh coffee is in the carafe, the furnace is working, there's food in the fridge, I don't have any health issues, and my husband doesn't even want me to lose weight. What's to complain about?

One last thing. You can become happier. The fastest, most effective way is to count your blessings. I'm not kidding. This has been "Scientifically" verified. Every night (or other specified time) or third night (your choice up to a week apart) you sit quietly and write down (or just think about, but writing makes it real) three or four things in your life that you are really blessed with (and you have to mean it). Apparently this act of focusing on the positive is enough to make you measurably happier. It sure sounds easy.

And the very best thing about this view of happiness is that if you are unhappy - it's your own fault. Yet another thing to be unhappy about. I call that a win-win situation.