Choosing Happiness

When you're two years old, your happiness is created or taken away by the people around you and the events taking place. You begin to be programmed by these people and events, an almost pavlovian response, so that your happiness is never under your control. Gradually as we get older our perceptions of the people and events change and so do our responses, but most of us continue to be reprogrammed and let our happiness be controlled for us. Happiness is NOT something that happens to you. Happiness is a decision. You cannot control the attitudes of the people around you, you cannot always control the events that occur. But you can control your response to both. You can make a decision how to respond. You can decide to be unhappy or even more importantly, you can decide to BE HAPPY. You can take in the attitudes and circumstance, mull them around and then respond any way you choose. It's not an easy skill. It means keeping your emotions under control. Your emotions are a tool. They tell you what is affecting you and how. It would be abnormal to not feel sadness at the death of a loved one, it would be abnormal not to feel joy at the birth of your child but any emotion left unchecked will become destructive. Each of us has a threshold of emotional fullness....a point at which the emotion has taken control of your actions and your decisions are no longer healthy or constructive. The key is to recognize that point and shift the focus away from the emotion and back to rational decision. The Lord gave us "free will". He didn't give it to us just so we could pick out movies at BlockBuster. It's there so that each of us has the ability to overcome the minor and major crisis that enter our lives. He allows us to choose our happiness even when our circumstance would seem to deny us. There have been times in my life when I have been unhappy. Gradually I've learned to make a shift....to accept the negative and simply not be satisfied with the circumstance. With dissatisfaction comes motivation to make changes, and changes are more easily accomplished when your attitude...happiness...is good. The result is that the future always has possibilities, and the past has already been dealt with. All of us have this ability, no matter what happened in your past, no matter what is happening in your present.

Make a decision......

Choose happiness.....