“You are as happy as you choose to be.”

Rick Warren

Good morning, friends!  I hope you all are well today and doing fine whatever you are doing!  Life has been a whirlwind for me the past few weeks but steady times have arrived.  So, let’s get to it!

Think for a moment about all the choices you have in your life.  I’ll play: what to eat for the next meal (if you’re blessed), what to do in your free time today, what to wear today, how to react to people today, … and then the list gets a big foggy.  We have much more control (choice) over our lives than we recognize, so much so that we take most of it for granted.  Yet rarely when we consider our choices do we consider the power we have over our feelings, particularly over our happiness.  Happiness is too often relegated to the dust bin of reaction or delegation.

Our consumeristic society has something to do with this trend.  Tomorrow is “Amazon Prime Day”, the day Amazon promises over one million big deals to Prime members for one day (which actually is one and a half days…).  It is predicted Amazon will rake in $3.4 B this go round.  How much of that bargain-seeking will be happiness purchases that are doomed to disappoint?  Have you ever made a happiness purchase?  Me too.  Sad for both of us.  We can see hints of the happiness deficit in the drug epidemic in America.  Who would choose a false reality if life were happy to begin with? 

I saw cracks in my understanding of happiness last week working with former felons to feed hungry people and with homeless men serving other homeless men.  All around me I saw happiness from places and people I would have thought would be desperately unhappy.  What, I wondered, was the deal?  These men were choosing happiness when most of the choices I have they don’t.  In other words, stripped of the Amazon consumeristic lure they choose the more important things they have left: feelings, and particularly happiness.  It was amazing.

* How can you choose happiness for yourself for the next hour?

* How would today be different if you had chosen happiness this morning?

* What triggers can help you choose happiness every morning?

Of the five regrets persons most often express on the death bed one is the wish life had been more happy.  You and I are far (hopefully) from our death bed.  Stop relegating happiness to other persons or things.  Choose it!  And have a great week!

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18