Happiness is not where you’d expect it to be

While there are no guaranteed ways of assuring happiness in life, the best advice is simply to accept our responsibility for what life dishes out to us—that is, neither blaming others for what you’re responsible for, nor taking too much of others’ responsibility.

But understand this, your responsibility and mine is usually a farther stretch than we think.

To illustrate this point, imagine feeling dissatisfied about someone’s attitude.  It rubs you up the wrong way.  But your happiness is actually linked to theirs.  If you rebuke them for their attitude, opinion or otherwise, they’ll neither listen to you nor respect you.

Our responsibility first and foremost is to dignify the person and see the world from their viewpoint enough to engage.  Nothing’s achieved in concert with others unless there’s a trusting rapport.  Our responsibility is to nurture partnership with all the people we encounter.  The psychology agrees.  People don’t listen to your logos (logic) unless you show them you care about what they care about (your pathos)—that’s about finding a place of agreement, even if it’s small.

Happiness within is about taking the blows that life delivers and warding against bitterness.

This is harder to achieve than most of us think.  It’s about achieving acceptance, which again is harder to achieve than we think.  Essentially, it’s doing what only we ourselves can do, nobody else can do this for us.  We can’t export the work to others to do.  It must be done by us alone—it’s our responsibility.

We can’t control a lot of what happens, but we can control our responses to what happens.  Again, although this sounds easy, it’s a lot harder to do in practice.

Your happiness is closer than you think it is, but it’s also not where you think it is.

Happiness is as close as accepting your responsibility.  It’s hard but there’s no other way.

All of what I’ve discussed above is part of the psychological principle of internal and external locus of control.

Photo by nine koepfer on Unsplash