Believe it or not, how you define happiness, or for that matter, success has a lot to do with whether you actually achieve it or not, in the long term! What’s the one thing that will make you feel happy and successful? Or even the several things, that if you get them or achieve them, will make you feel happy?
Several millions in your bank account? Being the CEO of your own company? Having the home of your dreams and your ideal soul-mate to share it with? Travel, and vacations in exotic places?
All of that implies that success is some goal to be achieved, something to be acquired, a certain status to be obtained when the truth is that it’s simply a feeling to be embodied. Happiness, and its twin success, are elusive only as long as one is attached to a material outcome; when you become attached to the feeling you would have if you had that money, house, partner, or ticket to a ball game, you can keep that happiness and feeling of success going endlessly.
It doesn’t matter how much you achieve, accomplish or acquire, because whatever it is, there is always something bigger or better that you then want. As soon as you’ve achieved a goal that you were sure will make you happy forever, you turn your attention to something else that is still lacking. There is an infinite number of things to acquire or to achieve, you will never get to the end of them as long as you live!
Until you realize that happiness and success don’t lie in any event, circumstance, or thing outside of you, but solely in the feelings that you generate inside of you; and feelings are always available, whatever the circumstances presently seem to be. You just have to choose which feelings you want to feel.
Whatever your age, circumstance, job or relationship, happiness is always within reach, because it’s never somewhere else, it’s always here and now, or it’s nowhere at all. Think that through! If it was nowhere, nobody could ever be happy, not even for an instant! And yet, there are happy people, and everybody has had some experience of being happy at some point in time.
So happiness is a state of being that you can generate at will, by changing your perspective about the events and circumstances of life to as more empowering and positive one than you have held previously. Do that again and again, until you start feeling that you are okay, right in this moment, even if the world seems to be going crazy.
Circumstances constantly change, there could be no evolution without change. So celebrate every change as another step towards your evolution presented by the Universe to let you choose how you are going to receive the change: with optimism and gratitude, (and you’re allowed to not like it!) – or with judgment and blame. One leads to happiness, the other to a self-created hell.
