Don't Worry, Be Happy

The Power of Positivity. Turn that Frown Upside Down. Choose Happiness.

We should be happy. That's what we're told. We see the message everywhere, overtly from books to bumper stickers, more covertly through advertising and media.

The method behind the message is to subtlety make us believe that happiness is the ultimate goal, and that it is something outside of us that can be bought, fought for or earned.

We begin to believe the lie that if we are not always blissful, we’re doing something wrong, there is something wrong with us, somehow, we are failing and then we become even more unhappy.

We start thinking that if happiness should be our primary goal, and our primary state, and we can't attain it, we are fatally flawed. Not only is that not true, if you buy into the lie, it is actually harmful.

We are dogs chasing our tails.

When you start living a more mindful life, you realize that the truth is our goal shouldn't be to constantly feel happy, but to constantly feel fully.

Our goal should be to experience what life has to offer, the good, the bad and the ugly on life's terms, not on ours.

Again, I circle back to the dictionary definition of mindfulness: (I do that often, in my columns and in my life!)

Merriam-Webster Dictionary says:

“Mindfulness is "the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis.”

We should be aiming for awareness and acceptance, not lollipops and unicorns.

We should be LIVING our lives, not trying to get them to look Instagram-worthy for others.

It's true, there is no joy without suffering. The ebbs and flows of life and the contrasts form a story, not a snapshot. The full story is where both the pain and the beauty are.

"To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose, under heaven." -Pete Seeger (taken from the third chapter of the Book Of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament in the Bible). In next week’s column, we'll talk about forming our own definition of self