Happiness is our natural state. Watch children. Most of the time, they are “Smile Factories”, endlessly delighted, pumping out smiles, eyes sparkling, full of joy and excitement about the world around them. Somewhere along the way we tend to lose that ability to find happiness in every present moment.
Life happens, pain, rejection and disappointment inevitably occur. Not everyone we wish to love wants to love us back, all efforts do not succeed. Eventually, the child becomes the adult, often fiercely determined to never hurt again and resolved to protect themselves from hurt or harm. Yet the very walls we build to protect us, isolate us, keeping out both potential pain but also the fullness of life.
The wonderful thing is, we have within us the powerful ability to choose differently, to choose happiness, to create joy from within. We tell ourselves a story about everything that happens to us and the story we choose to tell ourselves, the thoughts we choose to think, incredibly impacts our emotions, our moods, our energy, our actions, our life, our happiness.
Change your mind, change your life. Choose to interpret the world in ways that empower you, that energize you, that move you forward and upward. You are the creator of your story. You may be challenged to control the thoughts that come to mind but you can certainly choose the thoughts that stay in your mind and that ability will grow stronger and more habitual with committed practice.
Choose positivity, choose to water the seeds of happiness in your life and you will be richly rewarded with blessings beyond measure.
Closing Quotes:
‘The mind is its own place,
and in itself
can make a heaven of hell,
a hell of heaven.”
– John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1609-1674
“The fountain of content must spring up in the mind,
and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature
as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition,
will waste his life in fruitless efforts
and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.”
– Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1709 – 1784
“… for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
– Shakespeare, Hamlet: Act 2, Scene 2, Hamlet speaking