The playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” Read this quotation again because you must get this before you will be happy. Although you will have plenty of help along the way, you—and only you—can make you happy. You must do the work to create what you want in your life, and sometimes the work can seem downright hard. It also can be lots of fun. Whether you experience the journey as growing into happiness or groaning into happiness depends on you. How you experience the journey starts with your attitude.
Now if you’re like I am, this is a hard idea to swallow, and certainly not the easiest way to begin your journey. But it is the most important way to begin. When I first started thinking that maybe my attitude was getting in my way, I had to take a long hard look at the person I had to look at the hardest—me. It was so much easier to blame my husband of years ago, or to talk about how that other person hurt me or made my life hard. It was while I was on a trip to Wales, hiking up a mountain, that I got it.
There I was hiking 3,560 feet up Mount Snowdon, my companion a man who asked me to love him, and then broke my heart. Every step for me was sheer torture and I made sure he knew it. “This is too hard. I don’t need to climb a mountain. I’m only here because of you. I don’t want to do this. Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.” And then I saw her, a frail looking grayed haired woman slowly lifting and putting down a walker, taking a step, again lifting and putting down the walker, each time tiny tuffs of dust swirling around the rubber tips. She climbed to the top of the mountain that day, putting one foot in front of the other, step by step by step. Aided by her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren, this lovely and brave lady was 79-years old. And she was smiling!
I got it! Just like that, I got it and suddenly my pack that had felt heavier than my broken heart was weightless. I was happy. In spite of a broken heart; in spite of being tired and weary; in spite of burning muscles and aching feet, I was happy, genuinely, deeply happy.
Regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in right now in this moment in time, you can experience happiness. You begin by taking responsibility for your life. And here is the crux. Most of us do not want to take responsibility for our lives. It is much easier to give up our power to someone else, let someone else dictate our life to us, and then blame them because we are unhappy.
We all know of someone who is happy in spite of tragic circumstances, and we all know someone who is unhappy in the best of circumstances. What do the happy people have in common? Attitude. What do the unhappy people have in common? Attitude. Being happy begins with a choice, a decision that you want to live the experience of happiness.
I was once asked why people seem to need to reach bottom before we get the importance of attitude in our lives. I responded by saying, “It’s not necessary to do so.” I doubt that the person who asked liked my answer; we never do like to hear that we can stop our suffering at any time; that it is our choice to stay in the suffering; that by shifting our attitude regardless of the circumstances of our lives, we can change our emotional state—we can move from unhappiness to happiness.
I’ve noticed over and over that people who seem addicted to sadness will find a reason to be sad, even when their lives are filled with all that should make them happy. One man told me that he looks at his life as a pattern of highs and lows, and when he’s high he knows it won’t last so he becomes sad knowing the happiness will fade.
I’ve also noticed that people who are sad are in deep need and sorrow. They go from person to person asking for the pain to be removed. Of course, no one can remove that pain, NO ONE, except the person who carries it. All anyone outside of you can do is border between supporting you in your journey of healing and not cross over into doing it for you or letting you off the hook of doing your own work. It’s a tightrope walk to help someone in pain and addicted to sadness. Eventually unhappiness addicts become angry with the healer because no one can rescue another. We each must walk through our own trials and tribulations and elations and ecstasies, and life is filled with all of these. How we perceive each—our attitude—will help us move through the tough times with grace and wit or with deep sorrow and unhappiness.
If we can look beyond the surface of the circumstances, we are able to see the deeper reality. For example, perhaps we are being asked by Spirit to rewrite an old pattern that no longer serves our lives. Let’s say it’s a pattern of broken relationships and we’re being asked to make wiser choices. To get your attention, Spirit may offer you a relationship that is going to leave you with a heart that feels like the other stabbed you a thousand times, stomped on your heart and yanked it out of your chest and threw it on the dung heap, and then tossed a ton of manure on top. I’d call this the Big Bang of heartbreaks, but before this big bang there was a whisper or a shout. Perhaps you even saw all the red flags, but decided to ignore then until you no longer had a choice, and now all you can do is allow your heart to be broken open and pray for greater wisdom in relationships. Spirit always whispers before the shout and always shouts before the big bang, but so many of us wait for the big bang before listening or taking actions that will bring us joy, because we are addicted to the drama that accompanies unhappiness. Only each of us can do the work that heals our patterns and changes our addictions of heartbreak and longing to patterns of happiness and joy. When we get this, we will hear Spirit’s whispers long before the shout.
Still, most of us will experience a few big bangs and a lot of shouts in our lifetimes. Life, by its very nature, throws us loops and it’s up to us to decide whether to ride the loops and yell woohoo or fall off the loops and smack against the cement that’s always waiting. The difference is in our attitude, and the easiest way to have an attitude of riding the loops is by setting an intention for happiness.
Every morning set the intention that you want to experience happiness. Put it in writing. You might write: “Today my intention is to be happy.” Throughout the day, continue to remind yourself of your intention. When something upsets you, remind yourself of your intention. When you get caught in the mundane, remind yourself of your intention. When you think someone else is making you feel this way or that way, remind yourself of your intention: “Today my intention is to be happy.”
During this day, you will have plenty of opportunity to experience a wide range of emotion, including everything unlike happiness. Keep returning to your intention and you will have plenty of opportunity to experience happiness. The choice is yours.