You Have the Choice to be Happy

Read the title of this post out loud to yourself. Do it again and replace ‘you’ with ‘I.’ My question to you is this:

Do you really believe this?

You might be thinking ‘yes, yes I do really believe this. I have the choice to be happy.’

If that’s the case then why do we so often choose not to be happy? It’s a tough pill to swallow, but the normal modus operandi for most of us is choosing not to be happy.

Think about the following scenarios:

- You’re walking down the street on your way to work and someone rushes by you, physically bumping you to the side.

- You wake up in the morning with plans of going to the beach for a party that’s been planned for weeks and you’ve been looking forward to, but you find that there’s a torrential downpour outside.

- You get to the checkout line in the grocery store and choose one line over another only to find that if you went in the other you would have checked out much sooner.

- You arrive to the airport on time only to find that your flight has been delayed for 2 1/2 hours.

- You’re running late for an appointment and you run into the middle of a traffic jam due to an accident.

All of the above are common occurrences that happen to many individuals on a daily basis. They’re moments in our life when an event happens, a propensity is triggered and response happens.

Unfortunately, more often than not, that response is negativity and avoidance. We don’t like the situation and we wish we could be somewhere else or out of the situation, which inevitably leads to dissatisfaction, anger, fear and ultimately unhappiness.

At these moments, the opportunity for choice arises at the intersection between thought and action.

This isn’t as obvious as it seems because we think that we can control our thoughts, but nothing could be further from the truth. We cannot control our thoughts and doing so is a futile exercise.

Sit down for 10 minutes of meditation and by meditation I mean simply sitting down and let what happens, happens. Meditation isn’t much more than that. You’ll quickly realize that thoughts are in abundance, seemingly popping up from nowhere and we have absolutely no control as to what those thoughts are.

Meditation masters and students of the mind haven’t mastered controlling their thoughts, they’ve mastered controlling how they respond to thoughts.

That’s where choice comes in and that’s where we can begin to find happiness within our lives. Surrendering to what is and not trying to control or escape what is happening is where we begin to see glimpses of that happiness we seek.

I encourage you to watch the below video of one of the passengers on the US Airways flight that crash landed in the Hudson river in 2009. He talks about choice and choosing to be happy. He says:

“I no longer try to be right, I choose to be happy.”

In the coming week, keep this quote in the forefront of your mind. Look at areas in your life where you choose not to be happy. Look for situations where you get caught up in your thoughts and swept away by them rather than choosing to objectively look at them, explore them and take the opportunity to learn from your normal, habitual patterns.

I’d love to hear about your experiences.