Happy Little Flow Chart

I love this little flow chart. It reminds me of one of the simplest principles that's also one of the easiest to forget. It in no way stands as an endorsement by me of Happiness-as-the-optimal-choice. All choices are valid. Rare is it that we have a simple choice between something making us happy and not. Most times, the choices we make as grown ups make some parts of us happy and others, not so much so. I know too that "happy" and "unhappy" aren't the only possibilities there are in terms of our emotional state. Is a woman in transitional labor happy or not? Is someone happy who's apologizing sincerely for a mistake they made that caused someone grief? 

Our culture seems to have an addiction to happiness, thinking that somehow if we just do the right things, we can get to a place where we've arrived at Happy Land and can coast the rest of the way on Happy Wings. This illusion and our do-anything-to-avoid-pain approach to life actually causes a lot of harm, even violence, emotional and physical. Sometimes doing the thing that makes us NOT happy (or comfortable or relaxed or carefree or...), sometimes that unhappy-making thing is exactly the right thing to do. 

What I do mean to endorse is aware, conscious choice. We don't have to be victims of our lives, historical or otherwise. We can't always choose what happens to us, but we can choose our actions, attitudes, belief systems. We can control a lot more than most of us think we can. It may take some work to get past the blocks that keep us from availing ourselves of all the options that are open to us, but if we're willing to do the work, freedom is always there waiting for us. It's the sun that is no less there just because there are storm clouds between it and our rain drenched heads. 


The more we own our power of choice and the consequences for those choices, the more we'll be able to create the kind of experience that we want to have in the world. There are consequences for every choice we make, including doing nothing, including standing still. We each have to decide what consequences we're willing to live with. Staying in a situation that makes us unhappy may be the better option for us at the moment. That's okay. No one can decide that but you. However, as long as we keep telling ourselves we're trapped, then we are, but only by our own beliefs. We're not trapped; we're choosing.


We almost always have choice in actions (unless we're handcuffed or the like and even then we do, within narrower parameters) and we always, always have choice of response. And therein lies our growth and our power.