The happiness project

It started out as just an idea.  I was not happy with where I was working, what I was doing and a bunch of little things that made my job unbearable and I was looking to find a new job at that point.  However, life has a funny way of pointing things out to you that supposed to kick you into responding in a certain way.  It was when I took up the challenge for me to figure it out that I came up with an idea.

That idea was: What will it take for me to be happy?

Now it's a struggle for most of my life to understand it.  People would appear to change in their life that created this almost insane like happiness and I didn't understand the source of it.  In college, it was people converting to Christianity that when they did so, they were amazingly changed for the better.  However, my upbringing had me accepting it at a very young age.  I was missing some big moment.

A couple of months ago, I decided to actually do something about it.  That's when I remembered something that I have learned in the past 4 years.  That truth is that ALL things proceed as a result of choice.

So phase 1 was this:  What if I just chose to be happy?

So I started to run with it.  Startlingly, this works really, really well!  Instead of this gloomy work environment where people are just phoning in their work from day to day, the interactions started to improve.  I started to really enjoy what I was doing.  To top it off, someone said to me, this place just ain't the same when you aren't around.  They wanted me to be there, because work is so much more enjoyable.

I told the heads of the company about this, and they liked the idea.  They started applying it to their own lives.  Things continued to improve.

However, life is not without a sense of irony and things started to turn.  When life gets negative or chaotic, the problem exists and resolves by how you react to it.  If you choose to let it get to you, it festers and becomes worse and worse.  However, if you rise above the challenge, then you may find yourself in a much better place.  So, how do you handle it?

Phase 2:  Learn to laugh at the ridiculous.

So lately things were taking a turn and just driving my energy back to the ground and it wasn't just one thing, it was a lot of little things.  Those little things are going to drag you around like you're Gulliver on the island of Lilliput.  Eventually they are going to take over and once they do, you're trapped.

Now I like horror films, but not for the incessant need for violence or disturbing images.  Actually it's because all horror films are based out of a comedic concept.  And depending on how you view that concept determines whether you are scared or purely and happily entertained.  I was watching "The Cabin In The Woods" and there's a scene that is hilariously funny, which occurs in the film.  The scene plays like this:  The characters are all being picked off one by one, and stumble onto this elevator that takes them into this structure where every possible cataclysm is stored.  Once inside the facility they barricade themselves in a control room.  As they are approached by the building security, they find a button that says "Purge" and they press it.  What happens next is that several elevator doors open and different creatures jump out and proceed to disembowel and eviscerate the security team.  Another security team shows up to help, and then the elevators open again with even more creatures.

To me this is a hilarious moment in the film!  But it was pointing me to the fact that when things are just really serious and it's becoming almost combative in conflicts, the one thing we must remember is that it's actually really funny.

It's like what Metatron says in the movie dogma when Bethany asks what's God like.  "God?  Lonely.  But funny.  He's got a great sense of humor.  Take sex for example.  There's nothing funnier than the ridiculous faces you people make mid-coitus."  To which Bethany replies, "Sex is a joke in heaven?" Then Metatron says, "The way I understand it, it's mostly a joke down here, too."

So as my happiness project enters phase 2, I thought it would be a good time to let people know what I have been up to and give them something to work on.  If I have learned anything over the years, it is that reality is shaped by how you perceive it.  Nothing else.  You choose to live in a way that makes you happy or not.  The people around you, if you consider that they are part of your mind, then a simple thing as changing your mind has the potential to make their lives better.

Choose happiness, learn to laugh at everything.  See how that works for you.