This is a reedited version of one of my previous weekly musings. It was first penned in February 2011.
To My Magnificent Fellow Life Travelers:
This week I received an email from my wife. It was one of those “send this to seven people and you will receive a miracle but if you don’t, you’ll get run over by a truck” emails. I swear, if there was an annihilate key on my computer in addition to the delete key, I would pound on the former every time I get one of these! But this time the story and the message contained in this email chain was quite remarkable and shareable.
At the epicenter of the tale is a 92-year-old who is described as “a petite, well-poised and proud man.” He is fully and impeccably dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with his hair fashionably combed, his face closely and perfectly shaved, despite his being legally blind. Recently widowed after seventy years of marriage and with no one to care for him, on this day he is moving into a nursing home.
After sitting in the lobby of the home for several hours, he is finally met by the staff person assigned to show him to his room. Despite his enduring such a long wait, when she introduces herself, he responds with a sweet and kindly smile. As she helps him get up from the chair and into his walker for the trek to his room, she begins to describe it.
“I love it!” he replies with the same exuberance a child might have when presented with a new puppy.
Somewhat taken aback, the staff person responds, “Mr. Jones, you haven’t even seen the room yet; perhaps you should wait to actually see and experience it, lest your expectations be tempered by reality.”
“Seeing it doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he responds. “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’ve already decided I love it. It is 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 all the parts of my body that no longer work or I can get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do.”
He then adds this simple, yet profound, observation about being happy: “Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes are open, I’ll focus on the new day and all of the happy memories I’ve stored away over the many years I have been blessed with new days. Old age is like a bank account; you withdraw from what you’ve put into it. So, what I’ve learned over these many years, not without a stumble now and again, to be really rich, one needs to deposit a lot of happiness into your bank account of memories. And you never stop. I’m still depositing.”
There are quite a lot of “life gurus” out there who preach that we can only find happiness if we live in the moment. I agree with that philosophy. Surely, carrying around the baggage of our past miseries only burdens our ability to focus on the happiness that also shares the same moment. But what if the moment happens to be totally lousy? Life isn’t always a bowl of cherries. There are many who are facing and enduring very trying times right now, in this moment. Sometimes there can be overwhelming barriers to feeling happiness. Is happiness lost or just temporarily overwhelmed?
That is where the “perspective” aspect of the subject line of this week’s Inspiration comes into play. As our wise nonagenarian advises: “One needs to deposit a lot of happiness into your bank account of memories.”
By storing up our treasured memories, we can then draw upon them whenever our current moment holds unhappiness. At these times we place our stored happiness moments on one side of our judgment scale with the unhappy moment on the other. If our happiness bank account is rich, then shouldn’t those memories outweigh the moment? They should, and that is why having the proper perspective is an integral component to maintaining a constant level of happiness. Proper perspective allows one to look at happiness globally as opposed to granularly.
Our ability to prioritize also helps us in choosing between happiness or unhappiness. If we only focus on one feeling at a time, how can we feel anything but that feeling?
Again, if you’re feeling totally happy, then perhaps focusing on that is all we need. However, quite often, life’s moments provide us with more than one set of feelings or circumstances. If we focus on what hassles are in our life, we may well be justified in feeling miserable, but if we focus on the good things that are also in our life at that same time, then we can choose which we will embrace and which we will discard. Given the choice, most of us will choose happiness over unhappiness. We don’t because we are too focused on the negative to even consider the positive. Prioritization presupposes choices and selection.
Happiness comes down to choice. As the old sage of our story says, “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time.” Unfortunately, quite often, so is sorrow and depression. Like Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoon, we all decide how we are going to posture ourselves in our lives. If we choose to walk with our head down, then we’re welcoming misery and depression. But, if we choose to walk straight with our head held high, then we’re more apt to notice the beauty that permeates life’s horizon. Remember your momma’s admonition to “Sit up straight!” She knew that an upright posture mirrors a steadfast core. Sometimes happiness lies just beneath the surface making its way up; sometimes we’ve got to fake it ‘till it does.
“If you search the world for happiness, you may find it in the end, for the world is round and will lead you back to your door.” ~Robert Brault
Have a Happy and AWE-full weekend!
William “Bill” Bacque