Happiness - The Choice That Never Gets Old

Did you choose happiness today? Sages, poets and studies agree: happiness is what everyone wants.  Yet so few of us live happily as an ongoing experience.  And this is a direct result of the fact that almost none of us were taught that happiness is a choice.

Human beings are choice makers.  We choose moment after moment, again and again throughout every day of our lives. We are choosing even when we are not aware of choosing.  Sometimes we choose consciously, more often we choose on auto-pilot. 

We choose our beliefs, our friends, our goals, our activities, and our actions. We also choose our clothes, our cars, our food, our toys and our pastimes.  And the prevailing hope/assumption is that the sum of our choices will create happiness.  When we fail to achieve happiness, we believe that we must choose new/different people, activities, work, recreation, cars, toys, etc., until we hit on the right combination that will create happiness.  This is good for the economy, but it is never going to produce happiness.

We get fooled into thinking these choices can produce happiness, because some of our choices do result in pleasure, and we are so unfamiliar with true happiness that we mistake pleasure (which is always conditional and transitory) as happiness.

Pleasure and happiness are not the same, but they are connected – just not in the way we have been conditioned to believe.  Most of us live our lives as if the more pleasure we can experience, the happier we will be.  This belief is backwards.  The way it actually works is this: the happier you are, the more pleasure you will experience in life, no matter what you are doing or what is going on around you.

Happiness is not conditional.  It is the natural state of all human beings.  Most of us don’t experience it as our natural state because nearly everything we have been taught about how to live our lives creates barriers to our moment to moment experience of happiness.

This blog is dedicated to helping you understand what is creating those barriers, and assisting you in making new life choices that will dissolve the barriers and allow you to experience happy day in and day out.  And, believe me, happiness never gets old.