“Nothing can bring you happiness but yourself.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
We all want to be happy, but many of us have a mistaken notion about what happiness is or how to attain it. Happiness is not wealth, fame, or fortune. Happiness is not a possession to be prized. It is not a problem-free life, or a certain set of circumstances. Happiness is a state of mind, a way of thinking..
Dale Carnegie, author of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, defines happiness this way. “It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” If Carnegie is right, then there is nothing any-body but yourself can do to make you happy. Other people may be able to bring about changes in your life, either positive or negative, but nobody else can determine your thinking. Thinking is like breathing. We all have to do it for ourselves.
Thinking is a very private thing. There is no way that any one of us can tell for sure what another person is thinking, and we certainly cannot change what they are thinking. If they are obsessed with negative thoughts or thoughts of hate, we cannot change that. Only they can change their thinking. We can say and do things in an effort to influence the thinking of others, but we have control over only our own thinking.
The power that thinking has over our behavior and our mood has been recognized for centuries. William Shakespeare wrote, “It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” Buddha said, “What we think, we become.” And Mahatma Gandhi, the great pacifist who led India to its independence, wrote, “A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.”
Thinking is not the sole product of the mind. It begins with the heart where one’s feelings lie. Once the heart has dictated the conclusion, it commands the mind to provide the reasoning that will defend that conclusion. What passes for thinking in some people involves nothing more than simply rearranging their prejudices. I don’t believe that such people can be happy until and unless they relinquish their prejudices and replace them with feelings of love. Once love becomes a part of their lives, they will find that their own happiness depends on the happiness of others.
Most of us have active minds and all sorts of thoughts come to us. We have no control over the thoughts that enter our minds, but we do have control over the thoughts that dwell there. Thoughts that are useful to us and others should be encouraged, but negative thoughts should be ban-ished. When it comes to thinking about the past, we need to frequently weed our memory gardens. We should cling to those memories that make us happy. But memories that hurt us or others should be relegated to the deepest areas of our subconscious minds. We should try to learn from the words of Marcus Aurelius, a Roman philosopher who lived eighteen hun-dred years ago. He said, “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
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Author's Notes/Comments:
INTRODUCTION
“Life is difficult,” were the opening words of distinguished author and psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, M.D. in his monumental book, The Road Less Traveled. Dr. Peck accurately points out the harsh reality of life, and no amount of sugar coating can change that reality. But life can also be very good, at least part of the time, and whether or not life is good, depends more on how we think about life than about the actual circumstances of our individual lives.
Growing up on an Indiana farm, I began doing a lot of thinking about life at an early age. Like everybody else, I wanted to be happy, so I started trying to figure out what I could do to make life better. My father spent his life trying to scratch out a living from the land. He was a hard worker, and he did his best to put food on the table for his growing family. But a lot can go wrong when you are a small-scale farmer, and it seemed like just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Dad was frustrated much of the time, and I don’t think he had a very happy life.
My mother and father were very different in the way they thought about life. Mom always saw the glass of life as half full, whereas Dad saw it as half empty. My mother had more than her fair share of troubles. Her father had died in the 1918 flu epidemic, when she was only three years old. One of her two brothers had died as a child, and the other one passed away in his thirties. Mom gave birth to nine children, and did a lot of hard physical labor on the farm. Yet, she managed to be reasonably happy a great deal of the time. She lived to be 94, and she was the most loving person I have ever known. She loved her nine children so much that the love helped to offset a lot of her other problems.
Over the years, I have made it a point to observe and try to analyze the people I came into contact with. Most of them fell into the middle ground of being happy some of the time and unhappy the rest of the time. But some individuals stood out as being happier than most, and still others were so unhappy that they just seemed to hate the whole world. When I tried to make sense out of why individuals were happy, or unhappy, based on the circumstances of their lives, there didn’t seem to be any general pattern. It is true that people living in extreme poverty, have their happiness diminished by the poverty itself. Nobody can be happy when they are hungry or homeless. But, once income rises slightly above what is needed for the basic necessities of life, additional income, alone, does not seem to increase happiness very much. This observation has been supported by scientific studies on poverty. There is a definite relationship between income and happiness for those people living in poverty, but, once income has exceeded the basic needs, the relationship becomes weaker and weaker as income continues to rise.
Most people believe that, wealth, power and status are the surest routes to happiness. But, based on my own experience, and on my observations, I don’t believe that wealth, power, and status are the routes to true happiness for very many people. Happiness is not a destination. It is a way of traveling life’s journey. Happiness is a state of mind, or a way of thinking about life. We cannot change a lot of the circumstances of life that we find ourselves in, but we can change the way we think about life and those circumstances. Abraham Lincoln once said, “I think most people are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” I believe Lincoln hit the nail squarely on the head with that statement. Our way of thinking about life is more important than the circumstances of our lives in determining how happy we will be.
Thinking deeply about life became a basic part of who I am early in life, and my philosophy has gradually evolved over the years. I am especially intrigued by quotations from the great thinkers of the past. I get a lot of inspiration from reading thought-provoking quotations, and I have long used quotations as a starting point for contemplating life. About 17 years ago, I reached a point in my life where I felt an urge to start writing down on paper some of my thoughts about life. So, in July 1994, I sat down and wrote my first short essay on contemplating life. A small local newspaper published the essay, and I was hooked. Every week since I wrote that first essay, I have sent out a new essay, for publication in that same small paper, which is located more than a thousand miles from where I live today, in addition to other newspapers that carry my column. I have written more than 850 individual “contemplating life,” essays, and I want to share them with a much larger audience. The essays borrow bits of wisdom from throughout the ages. They are designed to inspire and comfort readers, as well as to stimulate some deep thinking about some very ordinary ideas.
