Sustaining Happiness in Difficulties

What do you portray to yourself and and to others pertaining to your life? Do you paint an image of your life as joy-filled and positively enjoyable or as melancholy and sad?

It's not what takes place in this life, but it is what we make of what happens to us in this existence. Life is not particularly just. Nor has it ever been. And I am guessing that it never will be. That's just the way it is. So if you don't desire the hand which has been dealt to you, then you most certainly are justified to complain all you please. But yet and still, amongst all that complaining, it won't change conditions and it won't make it better. In fact, it will make it worse.

Our lives are characterized by the stories we tell ourselves and others. Delightful things happen to everybody and awful things happen to everybody. But it's the message we tell that accentuates the circumstance.

We've all heard inspiring stories about individuals who have surmounted hardships and difficulties. Those are the stories everyone enjoys listening to. They remind us of the victory of the human spirit. On the other hand we all hear stories of somberness and doom from often well-meaning friends, and love-ones. We hear magnified stories of sickness and desperation. But all of the overstatement of the unfavorable brings more unfavorable to your life. You get what you concentrate on. You see what you look for. If you are focusing your attention_ your mindset on "how terrible things are", that is what you are getting_ more of "how terrible things are". If you are focused on the positive, that is when you get more "positive" occurrences in your life.

You can choose the stories you share about the experiences in your life. You can choose to minimize the bad things and emphasis the good things.

You can decide to invest your emotions into the recollection of blissful and jubilant things and minimize the emotionally-charged words and stories you tell about unpleasant things. We all have things that don't appeal to us and things that occur in our lives which we would rather not have happened; but our lives go on. And so also do our stories. The perception of what happened to you lies within the story you tell about it. When you alter your story, you change your life because you modified the significance and the explanation of what happened.

Viktor Frankl, the author of "Man's Search for Meaning" survivor of the Holocaust said, "Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Viktor Frankl, is a great example of putting to action the principles that have been outlined here. Although he endured one of most horrific events in the history of time, he chose to tell his story in a non-horrific manner. Somehow he found meaning in it and he chose for his story to be a triumph of the human spirit. This also reminds me of when I was 10 years old, and had recently been released from the hospital after battling cancer for several months. I hated being in the hospital, and when it was over, I said to my sister who is 7 years older than me, "This was the worst experience I've ever had." And she informed me that it was not such a bad experience, because I survived and in fact had a miraculous experience. I could not forget that because I always looked up to my sister and I was impressed by how she showed me another side to my story.

I hope you are inspired by these stories and can see how applying these principles can be beneficial in your life too! PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... C: wait...