How to find Happiness

Posted on | June 16, 2009 |

Happiness, like sadness and anxiety, is very often a learned condition. We learn how to be gloomy from those around us. Yet if we want to we can also train ourselves to see happiness, respond to joy, to experience delight - and it doesn’t take a lot of work, merely practice. Sadness, by contrast, is something we’ve been practicing all our lives, and so we’re much better at it. The daily news delivers gloom and despair by the bucket load, but doesn’t ask us to see much in the way of joy.

We are, many of us, the olympic gold-medalists of gloom.

But there is a way forward. Happiness and joy can be found in any little thing. And like grass growing between paving slabs it doesn’t need much to get started, and it forces its way through. This is, in fact, its great strength. Sadness requires heavy blows to our psyche. To get us to cave in we need repeated attacks of events that can bring us down. Losses, mistreatment, betrayals. That’s what it feeds on. Joy, in contrast, can bubble up out of any little thing. And it often does.

Joy is stronger, every time. It’s a good idea to act out of that knowledge.

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