If you are reading this, you have a good enough reason to be happy. Being alive is a good enough reason to be happy. For the record, being happy is a good way to be.
Looking into the mirror I have no clue who that old man is. Whoever he is, he looks happy. He’s obviously a nerd because he wears eyeglasses. Although I like his glasses. Many old people wear glasses.
Linda and I have enjoyed being at every home Minnesota Frost women’s hockey game since the league started last year. The Frost won the league championship for the second year in a row. Gosh, watching them play those intense games to win the championship was a happy experience.
The guy in the mirror has light grey, ash hair. My hair, as I recall, is dark brown. No matter the color of his hair, he needs a haircut. He does have a nice smile. He looks happy.
Funerals are sad events. Although, I’ve smiled and laughed at the funerals of people I truly miss. Being sad they passed doesn’t preclude also being happy to have known them. Rest in peace my friends who have passed.
For example, I deeply miss my buddy Chet. Just thinking of him brings a smile to my face and a deep pang in my heart. I’m beyond happy to have spent the time with him. Just writing this brought both a tear and many fond memories.
Per the dictionary happiness is: “feeling or showing pleasure or contentment”. The nuance is that happiness is something you feel on the inside and / or show on the outside. Either way, happiness is about your emotions.
Try this experiment. Silently, to yourself, choose to be happy for a bit. Smile or don’t smile, but take a second and choose to be happy. At the very least, pretend to be happy. To be clear, I am asking that you actually think to yourself, I’m choosing to be happy.
Look at the wrinkles on the hands of that guy in the mirror. There is no hiding old age if you look at the hands. Hopefully my hands will only look that way when I get old. Why is that guy smiling? Probably he is thinking about how it’s pretty cool to have lived long enough to have wrinkled hands.
The nuance to being happy is that happiness is a feeling. Happiness is not an actual physical thing. Poor people are often happy. Rich people are not always happy. Both skinny and fat people can be happy. Really smart and less smart people can be happy. Happy is better than not being happy.
When my youngest was little, she got scared of the characters at Disneyland. She cried and cried and cried and cried some more. For her, back then, Disneyland was not the happiest place on earth. Eating ice cream makes me happy, however, I do not like brain freeze.
Contrary to most marketing campaigns, happiness is not something you buy, win, visit, drink, catch, gaain, lose, and you get the general idea. You might choose to be happy as a result of doing those activities. There are many possible and even likely alternative reactions to doing those things. Happy is a reaction to the thing, not the thing itself.
Winning the lottery might help you decide you feel happy however, it might not. We’ve all heard the stories of lottery winners who ended up very unhappy people. Buying a boat might make you happy but it might make you angry every time you try to launch it.
Life can be complicated with a whole host of complex factors that can influence your emotional reaction. Getting accepted into the University of Minnesota made me happy. Learning how hard it was made me less happy. Graduating made me happy.
On my last day of immunotherapy, the lady in the chair across from me was getting an infusion for her cancer. She was very hopeful this time the treatment would work. The several previous rounds of treatments had slowed but had not stopped her cancer. She told Linda and I that she and her husband had decided being happy to still be alive is better than being sad the treatments had not yet fully worked.
So several years ago, Linda and I took a road trip down the Mississippi river to the Gulf of Mexico. About 30 or 40 miles south of St Louis, we stopped in this small town at a very rundown gas station.
We talked to the young lady behind the register. She was all smiles. She told us a couple weeks earlier she took her two kids and left St Louis in the middle of the night to get away from her scary boyfriend (gang member I think). She felt safe now. She was facing many challenges, however, escaping her previous situation made her happy.
The teeth of the guy in the mirror are too perfect. They must be dentures. That can’t be me, I had bad teeth my entire life time. That guy in the mirror’s teeth looks really nice. When the dentist asked what shade of white he wanted his dentures to be, I bet he told the dentist two shades whiter than his real teeth were.
Happiness is an emotion you feel. As the experiment above shows, you can just choose to be happy. I’ve periodically bought Powerball tickets since it began in 1992. I won fifty dollars once and a couple dollars here or there over the thirty plus years. Winning is virtually hopeless. Yet, every couple months giving the Powerball a try makes me happy.
The guy in the mirror looks hungry. Looks to me like he is thinking, time to go into the kitchen and get a chocolate chip cookie.
The closer you look the more you see.