Be Happy

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“Between stimulus and response

is man’s indispensable ability to

choose his response.”

-Viktor Frankl, WW2 Death Camp Survivor and Psychologist

In life, it’s very easy to complain, feel bad and to focus on the problems in life than to focus on what we can influence and feel enthusiastic.

I believe that’s one of the reasons why it’s very common to see people wearing a sad, angry or worried face than a smile. In fact, we have this tendency to think that people who smiles a lot and are very happy are either crazy or on drugs. It’s kind of like being happy is somewhat of a crime. But the thing is, as my mom usually say to me every breakfast, “Every time you wake up in the morning, you have two choices in life: you either choose to be happy or you choose to be sad. You either choose to be excited or you choose to be miserable with living life. You either choose to be enthusiastic or you choose to be depressed.” And most of us, whether we like it or not, choose in default to look at life in the eye of pessimism. Why is this?

One of the reasons why a lot of people live miserable lives is because they didn’t know that they chose to live life miserably. When you tell a person who lives a poor quality life that he’s in the position he’s now because of the unconscious and conscious decisions he made yesterday, he’ll be shocked by your remark and will take it as an insult. On the other hand, there are also others who are able to realize this fact that they’re responsible of the way they live life and take it as an opportunity to renew themselves.

Whether we like it or not, we are who we are today because of the accumulated decisions of yesterday. Majority of people choose to feel like a victim with this fact which doesn’t make sense at all because there’s absolutely nothing we can do with the past. But what we’re capable of doing, though, as human beings is that we can choose our response with this fact. We can either choose to be a victim or to be happy and do something about our situation. Feeling bad or like a loser will never get us somewhere near the life we want. What we need to do is to accept the things we can’t change as something positive, as something meaningful and take it as something to propel us forward. By doing so, we’re able to work in a joyful spirit and be in the position to shape the life we want.

Another reason why people choose to be miserable than happy is because most think that being optimistic is a wishy-washy thing where you just think positively but do nothing. With this, I would like to make a clarification. A lot of our modern literature particularly those that talks about being positive, happy and enthusiastic tend to make being positive and enthusiastic as the means and the end. In other words, I believe that it’s very wrong to be positive for the sake of being positive. Yes, being positive and choosing to be happy are very vital in living a quality life but aside from doing so, it should be accompanied with action, of working towards being happy. I’m talking about being hopeful and paying the price of achieving what we’re hoping for. I’m talking about being solution oriented and not simply about being happy even if we’re not doing anything to solve the problem we have in life.

Yes, it’s far easier to be depressed and disappointed in life. But the thing is, God created each and one of us to be happy, to enjoy life because that’s one of the aspects of what it means to become the greatest persons we can be. Like anything else, happiness is a choice and it’s our birthright. But to be happy, we need to make that decision to be and to commit to it regardless of the challenges, problems and hardships we face in life.

Be happy.