If You Think You’re Happy…

I was going through some of my books on my shelf yesterday, like I do photo albums every now and then. I’d pick one up, flip through a few pages, stop to read a paragraph, and look for pages I’d marked, lines I’d underlined.

From Paris, with love

One was We’ll To the Woods No More by Eduard Dujardin, which was written in Paris in the 1880’s and translated into English. I bought it in a bookstore two decades ago and have held onto ever since. When I opened it, this underlined sentence caught my eye:

He thinks he is happy, therefore he is happy.

It’s something I’ve questioned over the years: What is happiness, really? Is it a state of mind? Is it something that circumstances and friends can weigh in on?

People have even asked me throughout my life, “Are you really always this happy?” It made me wonder if I was fooling myself. Maybe I thought I was happy…but really wasn’t. Maybe if I was more realistic and faced the facts of life or the seriousness of a situation, I’d come back down to earth and realize that I wasn’t so happy after all.

Well, phooey to that. I know the answer now. Happiness is a state of mind. It’s relative. It’s all in how you look at your life and see your circumstances. Like the character in We’ll To the Woods No More, if you think you’re happy, therefore you are happy.

The same goes for dating: If you think you’re in a good place in your dating life, therefore you are in a good place. If you think you’re close to meeting the love of your life and ready to be in that relationship, therefore you are. Life isn’t a list of moments we compute and spit out our state of being. Life is what we make it, how we feel about it and how we choose to face it. So why not choose the route that makes you feel good about yourself? Like my post on Get Un-Lost: Nothing Is Irreversible, you have the power to change what you’re thinking.

It’s not always easy, I know that. Maybe you had a bad day. A bad phone call. A terribly painful loss. An breakup with someone you cared about. Will that derail your single experience? Will that affect your future relationships? Well…that’s up to you. You haven’t rolled the dice and picked up a Monopoly card that tells you what square to place your silver boot on. This is your call. If you think your life will improve on account of what’s happened to you, therefore it will.

Choose your state of mind. Today, even for an hour, decide to be happy with who you are and where you are in your life. Think you are happy and therefore you are happy.

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Big love,