Dreamer's World June 04, 2018 - Happiness Is A Choice

    As I have made my way through this life, I have learned many valuable lessons. Sometimes I have to remember lessons that I had forgotten about.” One instance of a lesson from my parents was brought back to my attention when I was reading a quote from the late John Lennon, which read
“When I was 5 years old, my Mother told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them that they didn’t understand life.”


Happiness is a choice. It is a choice that we all must make each and every day as we go through our lives. Happiness isn’t something that we earn, it cannot be given to us by others. Happiness is a deeply personal choice that is the most important choice that we can make. There will always be people and circumstances that will push their own agendas onto us. Our Happiness is not their concern at all. We usually give in to the constant pressure to conform and find ourselves further and further away from the happiness that we seek. Eventually, happiness seems unattainable and impossible.
We try to make ourselves believe that we are happy with things and personal pleasures, but the emptiness persists. Deep down inside, we know that something is missing, but we have been so conditioned that we fail to realize what we are missing is happiness.
The world is full of schemes to trick us into believing that we can find happiness by following someone else, by doing what they tell us to do. Sometimes we force ourselves to believe that we have actually found happiness when we really have no clue. The plans that others laid out for us lead to dead ends, or worse, to conforming to something that takes away our freedom without us realizing it.
If we maintain our intellectual freedom, we find that the only way to reach happiness is to strive for that goal. This is the decision I mentioned. It is easy to make, but difficult to make work. The decision goes against every aspect of life that we have been forced to accept as we grow up. This decision can cost us dearly because it involves throwing off so much of the life that we have built, but we realize that the life in question wasn’t the one that we really wanted.
Personal priorities must be re-evaluated. Choices must be reshaped to determine if they are actually helping us along the way to happiness. Sounds impossible, I know, but life is a journey, and we decide which way to go. Happiness is also a journey that often takes us in a different direction than what is expected of us. I am not advocating abandoning everything and taking off on some wild goose chase, I am advocating making a personal decision based on what it is that we really want from life, what will it take to make us happy?
I said that Happiness is a choice, and the first thing about this choice is to decide to embark on a journey. As with any journey, preparations must be made before setting out on the trip. In this case, the first decision to make is where we want to go to find Happiness. That answer is different for each of us, and it requires breaking free of the patterns we have fallen into.
Plan your trip carefully, determine where you want to go to find happiness.

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