Happiness Makeover How To Teach Yourself to Be Happy and Enjoy Every Day

I you can be happier "What would happen to us if we really fell in love with life? How would our lives change if we really thought . . . that reality is fabulous . . . ? Would we be fools of whom other people take advantage, or would we find that life is exciting, joyful, and wonderful?" --James A. Kitchens It was a cold, dreary Saturday morning. My husband and I had plans to go out to dinner for a joint birthday celebration. Then Ana, our then three-year-old, woke up with a fever. She'd had recurring pneumonia since we adopted her at age one and fever was the warning sign. Cancel the sitter and hunker down to deal with one crabby child. For a sick Ana was not a pleasant experience--she'd cling to me and scream bloody murder if Don or anyone else came close. Somehow we survived the day, but not without many tears and tantrums. As night fell, I had her in my lap in the rocking chair. "Hard day, huh Ana," I said. "What was going on? What do you want?" She looked up at me and wailed, "I just want to be happy." Don't we all? No matter who we are or what our circumstances, isn't that what we each long for? Happiness, the experience of the sheer joy of being alive. Indeed, it is such an important shared value that the Declaration of Independence identifies its pursuit as one of only three unalienable rights. We all want it so badly, but like Ana on that December day, so many of us don't seem to know how to experience it on a consistent basis. Maybe the problem is with the word "pursue." Somehow we've gotten the message that happiness is out there, something to be sought after--in the right job, the mate who never annoys you, the $50,000 BMW--rather than inside ourselves. We've trained ourselves to think in "if onlys"--if only our spouse would come home from work earlier we'd be happy; if only we'd make $20,000 more a year we'd be happy; if only we could be a stay-at-home mom we'd be happy. We spend our time trying to make our "if onlys" come true only to discover that even if we do achieve them, a new "if only" arises. That was certainly true for me. For most of my first forty years, I was your average negative person. I would religiously catalog all that was wrong with my life and spend my time and energy trying to create a happier tomorrow. But when getting what I was sure would make me happy didn't--independence, money, success--I realized that I'd been looking in all the wrong places. So I decided to do a happiness makeover. This twelve-year process has led me to write a series of books on the virtues of kindness, gratitude, generosity, patience, and self-trust as ways to be happy, and to now look at happiness head-on. I've studied happy people, read all the books, done a lot of soul searching, worked hard on myself, and offered a helping hand to my clients. This week, I got a bit of validation that I'm getting somewhere. We've been doing work in our backyard and I invited the contractor and his wife to dinner as a thank-you. I'd spoken maybe twenty-five words to them beforehand. We had our normal family time, including after-dinner dancing in the living room with Ana. The next day, the man came to the door to thank me. "That was nice," he said with a smile. "You're really happy, aren't you?" I am, I thought, and it's taken fifty years of work to get here. Maybe that's why I've written this book--so that others won't have to struggle so long, so that more of us can answer a resounding yes, so that happiness can blossom to its fullness for ourselves and for those we encounter on our path. Happiness is its own reward, but it doesn't stop there. Happy people are accepting of themselves, so they don't spend precious time in regret. They accept others, too, so are free to love people as they are, raRyan, M. J. is the author of 'Happiness Makeover How To Teach Yourself to Be Happy and Enjoy Every Day', published 2005 under ISBN 9780767920070 and ISBN 0767920074.