Happiness is Wanting What You Have

Well, I'm off tomorrow morning to my Texas women's conference! I'm super busy packing and getting everything ready, so today's post will be the intro of my talk, which I had to write out in full just in case my kidney stone acts up and someone else has to deliver it for me (the talk, not the stone...). heehee

Without further ado, here it is:

HAPPINESS IS WANTING WHAT YOU HAVE

©2010 Susan Noyes Anderson

For more years than I care to count, one of my favorite quotes has been this one: Happiness isn’t having what you want, it’s wanting what you have. As a relatively untried and untested young girl, I admit that I was kind of a Pollyanna type. These days, though, as a well-tried and all-too-frequently-tested old woman, I can tell you from experience that unless you’re clinically depressed (and even then, there’s agency involved in getting the help you need), the decision to be happy is just that…a decision. Your own choice. I’m not saying it’s always an easy choice; in fact, many times it isn’t easy at all, but it will always be the right choice. Why? Because it makes you feel good! And it makes other people feel good, too.

When I worked as a counselor, I learned that some women don’t like the idea of taking responsibility for their own happiness. It sort of offends them to think that if they’re not happy there’s something they could or should be doing about it. But here’s the thing. Playing the victim role never got a sad person any joy. The truth is...embracing the idea that your happiness is pretty much up to you is empowering. Why should any woman give up little pieces of her happiness to the fickle whims of uncontrollable events or (even more uncontrollable) other people, when she can take the reins herself? Knowing that you can be the creator of your own destiny opens up a world of adventure and possibility. It allows you to be the master of your own fate…the writer of your own story…the fulfiller of your own dreams. It gives you room to be large and in charge…a doer instead of a boo-hooer.

Of course, we all need to boo-hoo once in a while. I’ve been known to do it myself…but it works better as a venting mechanism than it does as a lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong, grieving people need to grieve with all their hearts until they are finished, and I’m good with that. It’s necessary for the healing process...and therapeutic, too. But even those who mourn need to keep themselves moving through the pain. And the non-mourners…those everyday sufferers facing everyday sorrows and disappointments, need to keep their sadness moving, as well. Giving ourselves one or two days off for a pity party is just fine, but going beyond that is pretty much wallowing and not very constructive. There’s no upside in letting negative energy dictate who we are and how we feel.

Years ago, a sign in my office at Friends of the Family Counseling Center proclaimed, “The Fairy Godmother Isn’t Coming!” Too often, people visited the clinic wanting to be “fixed,” and I needed to make the point, graphically, that each individual had to do what was necessary to fix herself. I would hold out my empty hands as “proof” that I held no magic wand and that whatever positive changes clients made would be a result of their hard work, not mine. Some of them liked that, while others didn’t want to do the work. Can you guess which group found more of what they were wanting in their lives?

Being a writer, I’m fond of acronyms: both to make a statement and to serve as a tool for remembering what that statement is. Today, my statement is LIVE. That’s it. Just live. But do it in a way that feels good. A way that give you a better chance at finding the joy we all seek… and of hanging onto it through the inevitable times of sadness and loss we will all experience. While we can’t control the wind, what we can do is adjust our sails. We can also paint those sails in the brightest colors available to us.

The brightest color I know of is love, so the first letter of our acronym for LIVE (as in “how to” and “happily”) is L, which stands for Love God. (That should be a no-brainer, right?) The next letter, I, invites us to Invest in Others. (You’re probably thinking “service” with that one, but I’m here to suggest there’s a little more to it than that.) V stands for Value Your Gifts, which looks like a deep end full of murky water for some of the women I know. And E can appear equally challenging with Engage Yourself, a notion that might make even the most daring and determined woman run the other direction. After all, engaging takes extra effort…and energy. Since energy is a valuable commodity, we all have to spend it wisely. So let’s take a few minutes to explore these suggestions in depth and see what we come up with...

(end of intro)

What d'ya think? Does it leave you wanting more or make you feel like fleeing to the hills?

;)