v19.5 - Secret to Happiness Part 1

"Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention."
- Greg Anderson




Good morning folks,

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Are you Happy?  Really think about that simple question for a minute.  People say every single day they are happy but do people really know what it means to be happy?  Happy is defined as: enjoying or showing or marked by joy or pleasure; "a happy smile"; "spent many happy days on the beach"; "a happy marriage". Interesting that a definition of happy would contain "happy marriage" as an example.

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Author's Note: Funny how things can go sometimes.  I was in the middle of writing this musing and when I went to use the cursor keys to navigate around the page I accidentally hit the "back" button (my computer at work has a button on the keyboard beside the UP arrow and above the LEFT arrow called 'back').  When I accidentally hit this button, my browser went back a page and lost everything I typed.  Such is life.

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So we're able to determine that in order to be happy one must have joy.  Isn't joy the same thing as happy?  Joy is defined as: the emotion of great happiness.  So the secret to happiness is a circle between happy and joy; in order to be truly happy one must have joy, in order to have joy, one must be happy.  There's a key word in the definition of joy that I'm leaving out here; that word is emotion.

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An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts and behaviors.  It is a prime determinant of the sense of subjective well-being and appears to play a central role in many human activities (Wikipedia).

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You're probably asking yourself, "where the heck are you going with all this?".  To be completely honest, I have no idea where I'm going so bare with me.  I've known a lot of people who have an outward look of genuine happiness.  The come to work, converse with co-workers and friends and you think this person is truly happy.  Then that person goes home at the end of the day to a family or no one, they sit down in front of a computer or television and stay that way until it is time for bed.  The problem doesn't stop when you go to sleep at night, the negative thoughts and unhappy feelings persist throughout the night, the last thing you're thinking of tends to manifest itself in a dream or remains active in your sub-conscience while we sleep.

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Now I'm no psychologist or an expert in human emotions, so all my thoughts and opinions are my own.  My goal here is to touch at least one person out in cyber land and hopefully help them to experience true happiness.  Really reflect and take a step back and analyze your life.  What are some things in your life you wish you could change?  Over my next few musings I plan on diving into some of the things you can do to identify problems in your life and helping you find ways to overcome.  It is every person's right to be happy, whether you chose to allow yourself to be happy or not is up to you.

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Anyway folks, your homework exercise until my next musing is to write down (yes, write it down don't just keep it in your head) all the things in your life you wish you could change.  Whether it is something as trivial as hair color to something really important like a terminal illness.  Write it all down and read the list out loud back to yourself.  These are the things that are making you unhappy right now, these are the things that are inhibiting you from enjoying your life.  At the top of the page somewhere, write all in capitals: "MY LIFE!".  In my next musing, we'll look at your list and hopefully find ways to cross some of the things off it.

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Until next time my friends..

Cheers,
Al