Happiness
The 92-year-old, petite, well-poised and proud lady, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with her hair fashionably coifed and makeup perfectly applied, even though she is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today. Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary. After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, she smiled sweetly when told her room was ready. As she maneuvered her walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on her window. “I love it,” she stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy. “Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room …. just wait.” “That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged … it’s how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it … It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice; I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away … just for this time in my life.”
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Happiness.
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I like to think I’m a happy fellow all the time, because being happy is the best feeling in the world. Sometimes I fall down but I always remember to get up because no matter what people tell me, I will always remember that happiness is more than just a good feeling that comes from something awesome, but it is also a decision. Whether you want to be happy or not, is all up to you. Go into a situation down and out, you will leave down and out. You wake up happy, you do your regular 16 hour schedule, you have a few bumps and glitches in your day and maybe something doesn’t end up the way you want it to be. But even though you are afflicted by what happened, you remember you came into the day happy, you decided you were going to be happy, and though you hurt, you will remain happy because you decided and you told yourself that you were going to be happy. Just make the effort to be happy, it is more than a feeling that comes out of the blue, its a decision you make.
Its harder than it sounds, and it probably doesn’t make sense, but to me it does. Everything falls into place when you decide your own destiny.
