If You Want to Be Happy, Make This One Shift
It won’t give you instant gratification, but a life-long tool for peace.
Happiness. We all want it, yet it eludes most of us. We fall into the trap of pursuing desires — jobs, relationships, successes, material goods, or even experiences — and then find ourselves wanting more or something else. Desire is never fulfilled, only temporarily satisfied; the craving swiftly emerges again. A recent New York Times article went so far as to ask whether we live in a “post-happiness” era.
When I finally decided, once and for all, that I wanted to be happy, I committed myself to making one single shift. It wasn’t an easy shift, but it was a powerful one. And I have to keep working at it, because it’s a life-long practice. What was this step?
I stopped interpreting the world.
I did this first by simply accepting and allowing what was happening. By “accept,” I mean that I gave everything permission to be there. I didn’t push away the experience, the feelings, the reality of the events surrounding me. I didn’t recoil or reject or resist or proclaim, “This can’t be. This shouldn’t be. This isn’t right.” Instead, I allowed all of it — pain, anger, conflict, joy, connection, fatigue, sadness, affection, sickness, and even death — to be a…
