Wisdom Day 32
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“The highest spiritual path is life itself. If you know how to live daily life, it all becomes a liberating experience. But first you have to approach life properly, or it can be very confusing. To begin with, you have to realize that you really only have one choice in this life, and it’s not about your career, whom you want to marry, or whether you want to seek God. People tend to burden themselves with so many choices. But, in the end, you can throw it all away and just make one basic, underlying decision: Do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy?It’s really that simple. One you make that choice, your path through life becomes totally clear.
Greetings!
Is it just me? Or are most people – especially those of us seeking to live an authentic, spiritual life and live out our purpose – trying really, really, reeeeealy hard at this “life” and “spirituality” thing?
We pray, meditate, attend organized religious services, go on retreats, fast, cleanse, read every bit of spiritual wisdom we can surf to, get our hands on or download, purchase every cross, star, ankh, crystal, white candle and sage bundle known to humankind.
Perhaps underneath all this seeking is a belief that there’s some answer, some formula, some process by which we can get “this” right. Maybe underneath all the doing is a misperception that if we do “X” that our “Y” (that job, relationship, opportunity, money, reward or result) will surely follow. And then, of course, there’s always an undercurrent of fear that tries to convince us if we slow down or stop trying, we’ll fail, or miss out, or check out altogether.
And so we make a silent commitment with ourselves to attempt to guarantee our happiness by jumping on some human hamster wheel and just starting to run like hell “until”. Sometimes we don’t even know where exactly we’re headed. But, we convince ourselves, that we’ve made a choice.
We do and do and do some more believing that the quick fix to all of our problems is just to do more, something, anything. We keep tweaking this grand experiment called life, adding and subtracting people, places and things, committing to 5-point plans, making our lists and checking them twice in search of just the right mix of good deeds and decisions so that someday we’ll finally be worthy … and by worthy, I guess we mean happy.
But what if we’re approaching this happiness thing all wrong? What if all of that moving and shaking is a useless distraction that drains our vital Source energy and keeps us from getting still, quiet and aware enough so we can actually be present for the life we already have. Maybe, just maybe, our real happiness reduces to just one essential choice: the decision to be happy.
I think Michael Singer is onto something. A happy life really is quite simple; as simple, in fact, as Leo Tolstoy’s famous quote:
“If you want to be happy, be.”
Because when it’s all said and done, happiness is indeed a choice. Every morning, every day, every night and every moment we have an opportunity to define our experiences rather than allowing our experiences to define us. We can choose, as A Course in Miracles teaches, to see things differently. We can choose to be … happy.
Be well … and wise … and HAPPY!
Tonya Marie
Wisdom in the Whisper™ and WisdomintheWhisper.com by Tonya Marie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.wisdominthewhisper.com.
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