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Articles: My Thoughts | Happiness is the habbit I develop..
- Mr. Siri Siri
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Somewhere I read that, if you're not aware of the passage of time, you are happy. Most of us know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the opposite of that is certainly true. When we are unhappy, time creeps by, tick by tick, second by second, long minute by long minute. Time seems never to move and the more restless we become, the slower it passes.
William James, the American philosopher, once said that the quest for happiness is the secret motive that drives everyone. I do know that most of us want desperately to be happy, yet many of us cannot determine exactly what it is that makes us happy. How many times have we heard some person say, 'Just give me money and I'll be happy. Just let me win the lottery or discover a gold mine or inherit a bundle, and I'll be happy.' Usually this isn't true. Money can ease problems and help us to put aside worry, but that does not automatically mean that happiness follows.
Some psychologists believe that happiness and unhappiness can co-exist, that they are not the direct opposite of each other, that they are not two sides of the same coin. These two feelings co-exist in much the same way as love and hate. Avoiding things that make us unhappy or miserable can be avoided to make us less miserable but that does not necessarily make us happy.
What then is happiness? Probably it is best described as a sense of well-being, a feeling of self-approval. When we like and approve of ourselves, we become more outgoing, more social. We make more contacts, we are more social and reaching out. We touch others with our sense of well-being.
Our sense of well-being makes us happy and we are self-satisfied. Then we reach out to others and make loving contact in friendly relations. We engage in social behavior. In a way, we are spreading our good will about ourselves and we make others happy.
Happy people are social; with the absence of joy, persons tend to cut themselves off from others and spend waking hours alone and turned away from social situations. And this solitude reinforces the aloneness.
The capacity for happiness, for feelings of joy, must be developed by ourselves. In the past our failure has been to wait for happiness, to believe that, at some point in our lives, we will be happy. Studies of people now show that those who are happy worked at being so.
To be happy, we must develop a positive attitude about life. That is a prerequisite for happiness. We automatically cancel any chance of happiness if we start with feelings such as, 'Nothing good ever happens to me, ' or 'Life is a big mess and I hate it.'
The pleasure we will get from life is not fore-ordained. We must work toward developing it. It is, in fact, for us to control, for us to decide, for us to pursue. Pessimists are rarely happy, being too consumed with what has gone wrong and what will go wrong.
There seems to be several ingredients necessary for happiness: a feeling of well-being and then a reaching out towards others. We are also made happy when we help others, when we are aware of the needs of others and try to give them a helping hand.
Happiness comes to us when we enjoy what we do. If there is no enjoyment in our daily work, we should try to change our attitude or change our job. There are times when I wonder why I do what I do, there are times when discouragement and feelings of frustration and despair overcome me, but then I know that I have indulged in a moment of self-indulgence and weakness, for I thoroughly enjoy what I do 99% of the time.
We must search for ways to make our work more satisfying if we are to be happy.
Happiness also includes an element of change, of different routines to life; it means getting out of the same old patterns and exploring many new experiences of life. Sameness makes us unpleasant, keeps us bored and uninteresting, it limits us. Happiness will be ours if we work at it and give ourselves a change.
Thanksgiving is a time for happiness. It carries within it all of the elements. It is a social time, it is a time of thanksgiving and a time of self-evaluation.
Happiness is largely ours to control. 'Happiness is a habit I will develop.'
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