Choosing Happiness

By Andrea Scarpino

I don’t think of myself as an optimistic person. I smile more than I should (a counselor friend in college used to tell me I have “inappropriate affect”), but I don’t believe the world is an inherently good place or that situations generally turn out for the best. I have far too many counterexamples to prove otherwise. 

But since my visit to the Mayo Clinic and completing my mindfulness course, I’ve been working hard on how I see the world around me, on how I react to stressful situations, on how I respond to people who seem hell-bent on being jerks. Buddhists will tell you that you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to what happens to you. Meditation instructor Sally Kempton puts it this way: “You always have a choice about how you think or behave.” 

In taking on that philosophy, though, I’ve found that I also take on an incredible amount of responsibility for every thought, for every word I speak. If I always have a choice, then I have to assign myself some blame when I choose poorly, when I assume the worst in a colleague, for example, when I lash out at my mother on the phone, when I’m less-than-polite with a customer service representative. 

Which leads me to this challenge: every day for the month of September, I am going to try to choose happiness. Not choose to be happy—I’m not optimistic enough to go that far. But choose to see happiness around me, to see my life as filled with happiness in many small and large ways. And I’m going to tweet every day the happiness I choose. And because I am new at this, I’m inviting everyone I know to do the same (#choosinghappiness). Why not spend a month trying to choose happiness and see where that takes us? Why not find support in the happiness of those around us? 

Maybe this is just positive psychology mumbo jumbo, maybe just spiritual hooey magic—I’m certainly open to both possibilities. But research in neuroscience, biology, psychology tells us that the brain can be rewired, that stress can be reduced through mindfulness practice, that we can create much of our experience of the world. So why not try to create an experience filled with happiness? 

Beyond optimism or pessimism, beyond any religious or academic doctrine, I am a follower of the poet Nazim Hikmet. Because of his work, I live with an understanding that “This earth will grow cold,/a star among stars/and one of the smallest.” Because of his work, I “grieve for this right now.” But also because of his work, I live “without looking for something beyond and/above living.” Because of his work, I want to “take living so seriously/that even at seventy, for example, you will plant olives.” Every day this month, then, I dedicate myself to seeing the olive trees. To planting olives.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto