The Journey to Happiness … in Baby Steps
Let’s face it – happiness is complicated. I began to realize this as I provided mental and emotional support to my brother who lived with anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, chronic pain and suicidal ideation. Since that time, I have wondered if happiness is really a choice. For those living with mental illness, and for those who care for them, it's just not that easy.
It’s also complicated by well-meaning people. Has anyone ever said you should choose happiness, choose joy, or choose to be positive? This makes it seem as if happiness is like a light switch that you can turn on and off.
I also was reminded this week of the quote, “You’re only as happy as your least happy child.” However, I believe that caregivers are entitled to happiness of their own. It shouldn’t be dependent on the happiness of someone else.
While feeling joy or happiness can seem impossible sometimes, choosing to do something that brings you a little joy can seem more doable, like a baby step in the direction of joy. For me, it can be taking five minutes to snuggle my dog on my living room floor, writing a birthday card for a distant friend, making breakfast for dinner, or sinking my boots into the snow like sticky fingers in bread dough.
Humor is also one of my go-to coping strategies. There are lots of places to find humor – movies, comic strips, YouTube, or friends who always seem to make you laugh. It’s another baby step toward happiness that can help lighten a difficult situation, break the silence or tension in the room, or bring levity in tough times.
For further help, here are seven practices for unconditional happiness from an e-book that our friends at NewBridge Cleveland turned us onto about finding your power to be happy:
Practice 1: Learn the nature of unconditional happiness. Such happiness is not the same as conditional happiness or sense pleasures.
Practice 2: Learn that unconditional happiness arises naturally from your deepest self. It does not come from what happens to you in life.
Practice 3: Learn to turn your attention away from your desires for conditional happiness and sense pleasures, and turn it toward unconditional happiness.
Practice 4: Learn to see the truth of happiness in yourself through mindfulness and meditation.
Practice 5: Let go of your attachment to self-centered desires through acceptance, nonattachment, selflessness, charity, compassion, and forgiveness.
Practice 6: Live ethically, which reduces the power of self-centered desires as well as the guilt and regret that preclude happiness.
Practice 7: Choose work that promotes happiness.
Maybe seeking small, joyful things will one day add up to an entire reservoir of hope, or maybe they won’t. But I’m going to keep trying, and I hope you do, too. It’s within YOUR power.