Happiness cannot be travelled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude. – Denis Waitley
Life is a journey. Along that journey, one experiences many different situations, meet diverse people and encounter a multitude of adventures, happiness, sadness, achievement, peace, anger, excitement, despair and much more.
We can be generous and loving sometimes while other times we feel empty, vengeful and arrogant. There are times when one feels that life is satisfying, happy and fulfilling. However, life is not one long rollercoaster of joy and glee. Truthfully, as you read this you might be suffering of one kind of another of these experiences. Pain and heartache does not distinguish between age, or wealth or status or nationality. There is no easy way of protecting yourself totally from some of the hardships of life.
To some experts however, there is a way to minimize suffering and to maximize the levels of happiness that we can experience.
Some of life's sufferings are unavoidable. However we can take responsibility for preventing as much suffering as possible. Much suffering can be the result of our choices, behaviours, decisions that leads to pain, heartache or injury to ourselves or to others.
Suffering may be prevented by doing some of the following:
- Develop a spirituality that connects you healthily to God, yourself and others;
- Don't take unnecessary risks;
- Pay attention to the wake-up calls;
- Listen to feedback from others;
- Examine the negative consequences of your decisions;
- Take responsibility for yourself;
- Be honest at least with yourself;
- Learn from mistakes: other peoples and your own;
- Set realistic and achievable goals for yourself;
- Walk before you can jump
Suffering can also be something that is internalised. It can be closely connected to how we see ourselves or feel about our lives. God continually invites us to see ourselves as His beloved children. Accepting that our God is a loving God, and that he gave up his life for our sake because we are important and deserving of all his love.
And for us to live happily in this life, we should try not to be harsh, critical and negative towards others and ourselves, avoid being aggressive and rude to other people, mingle with people who are positive, healthy and worthy of respect, we should be able to forgive ourselves for our mistakes and stop envying other people. Life is short and we have to make the most of it. It is not too late to mend and change our ways and this holy season is the perfect time to try to start living a happy life.
