Shawn-ation

Do you ever lie awake at night for hours on end wondering what you really want to accomplish in life? What comes across your mind at those times? Do you think of what life would be like with more money than you could possibly spend? Do you fantasize about the car you would drive, the house you’d live in, your career? Do you think about the special someone you’d hope to meet one day. Do you think about the wonderful blissfulness of the relationship, how that person would have everything in common with you and life would be absolutely wonderful? Would you be happy then? You’d tend to want think you would be very happy. Great.

How happy are you now? How’s your job? How’s your boss? How’s your bank account, stocks, investments, etc.? How’s your marriage or significant relationship? How’s your car. Behind that fantasy you think about while lying in bed, are you stressed or worried? At some point or other in our life, we find ourselves unhappy.

 

What is the difference between happiness and unhappiness? Happiness is a difficult term to define, but for arguments sake we will consider a very basic definition: the state of being happy. Simple enough. I think that many people have their own various forms of that definition, but happiness is being happy. Contributors to happiness may include love, peace, contentedness, relaxation, or just a sense that everything is going okay. In fact, I think, for the purpose of these articles, happiness can be defined as “Everything is going well.”

Unhappiness, transversely, can be defined as something or everything is wrong. Contributors to unhappiness include fear, anxiety, stress, worry, or depression. Again, these are vague definitions mainly to get on the right page.

Is it possible to always be happy? Yes. I know many people would argue that it is not possible; there are too many things that go on during the course of the day that tends to ruin happiness.

 

Why people think it is impossible to be happy all the time. Simple answer: Beliefs. Your beliefs are your way of viewing the world. Your beliefs are like a set of lenses that takes the objective world and makes it subjective to your life. Here are a couple examples. As you read, decide whether each example is good or bad.

• Rain on a wedding day

• Death of a close relative

• Fired from a job

I’m sure that you took one look at each of those and decided it was bad. Why? Because that’s what we believe. But let’s look at this closer.

• It rained on your wedding day. However, the area has been suffering from a drought and a hot summer, and the rain felt good, cooled everything off and made your stuffy outfit for the wedding a little more comfortable. Besides, the farmers in your town have been praying for rain all summer. The rain was neither good nor bad. It was your belief that decided it was bad.

• Your favorite relative died. This is more cultural than anything else, but it still proves my point. In America we see death as the ultimate finality. However, in Mexico, death is celebrated with a great feast every year. Christianity sees death as the last step into glorious eternity, and so death should be celebrated. I know many older Christians who want people to have a big feast and party at their funeral to celebrate their life and their entrance into heaven. Again, death being neither good nor bad, it is beliefs that determine which.

• You got fired from your job. Sure it paid well and had okay benefits, but did you really want to work at Wal-Mart for the rest of your life? Shortly after getting fired you find an add for your dream job and are hired. Being fired again is neither good nor bad.

So what’s the point in all this? From a simple reading it just seems a matter of perspective. Well, it is. Having the full picture allowed you to make a better judgment on the situation, and your judgment came from your beliefs.

 

Application: To begin to be happy all of the time, we must take a look at our beliefs and judgments and understand why we deem things to be good or bad. A simple way to break it down is to look at the stimulus/response method.

STIMULUS => BELIEF => RESPONSE

The stimulus would be something like rain, traffic, crime; pretty much anything in the outside world that you don’t control (which, by the way, there are a lot of things out there that you don’t control, despite how much you think you do, more on that later). For the rain scenario, the rain would be the stimulus. Your belief is that the rain feels good despite the fact that it is your wedding day. Your response is happiness, or joy, or that it is good.

Again, look at the world around you and begin to take notice on why things are good and bad and what belief causes you to judge things so.