Many books, yes whole books, are dedicated to the pursuit of happiness.
And yet, all it takes is a simple mind shift. Happiness isn't something we need to find, as it's something we feel all the time. Which begs the question: Are unhappy people choosing to be sad? Find out how to tap into instant happiness.
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Last week I did something I knew I shouldn't have done.
My wife, Renuka decided to take a little change of scene and headed up north to a place called Opua.
As lovely as the place was, the furniture wasn't optimal to use a laptop. However, I plopped myself on a very comfortable sofa and typed furiously. I was very proud of the fact that I had corrected all the assignments for the Landing Page course, answered all the posts in the membership site at 5000bc, and wrote an article as well.
What I wasn't proud of was the slight backache, which progressively moved to my neck
About 24 hours after my misadventure on the sofa, I was coughing by day and well into the night. My sleep was disrupted and Renuka wasn't exactly having a great time either. However, right before all of this backache and coughing, I was fine.
In short, I was happy.
I didn't need a course, a book or even a lecture on how to find happiness. To me, at least, happiness is like health. It's a constant until it's not there. To search for happiness is a bizarre concept because we have happiness all the time. You turn on your computer, and it's on.
You get into the shower and the water magically appears. Almost all our days are filled with things that work and work consistently. When things work, we already have happiness. Our normal day is filled with happiness.
Which means that the only time we're not happy is when we're unhappy
This leads us to the only possible conclusion: that somehow we're fostering unhappiness. That if we were to make a list of things that make us unhappy, they would clearly fall into two categories. The first category would comprise of things that we know we should get rid of, but haven't. If we were to sit down and list all the things that made us truly unhappy, it would be a very small list.
The biggest second category would be the idea of our perfect world
I hear the roar of the motorcycle past my window and it's irritating. That tech support person, who's not answering my questions correctly—that's not on, either. We go through life getting annoyed with stuff that barely registers, even with others around us.
Chairs not in the right place, paintings not quite at right angles to each other—they all go from annoyance to obsessive unhappiness. Many of these problems are solvable, and some simply aren't. We live in a very imperfect world and to try and have things exactly the way we see it, is the root cause of unhappiness.
Happiness is what you're experiencing right now.
You're well. Things are working, more or less. That's happiness. Then, of course, there's that moment when your kid comes home with a story. Or you take that refreshing sip of chai. That's joy. Which is a slight stage above, and is fleeting. Joy is that rainbow moment that's here and then gone just as quickly.
Happiness, however, is always with us. Unless, of course, we choose to be unhappy.
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