What is happiness?

* This text was originally published in Portuguese.

Many times we ask ourselves: what is happiness? How to get it? How to build it? How to provide it?

The question is as simple as difficult to answer.

First I thought that happiness would be good things that happen to us, something like God's blessing on our professional success, personal, etc..In this stream, if we understand that happiness is something that happens to us, we are at the mercy of others to be happy.

Past few days, I thought better and came to the conclusion that happiness is a point of view, nothing more.

Simple like that? Yes, but look on the bright side (point of view, see?) Being the happiness only that, it becomes easy to achieve it. Being the happiness just the way you approach life, it only depends on us.

Consider this ... you can wake up in the morning and be sad about it, but you forget that many people have no jobs, so do not wake up early. You can be sad when you don’t reach a certain objective, but forget to think about it and lose the opportunity to correct errors that resulted in the unexpected result.

With this new approach to happiness, I arrived at some conclusions:

1. Happiness is the way we view the facts of life, and being the way we see these facts a choice, happiness is a CHOICE, not a privilege of God. Indeed, the essence of free will is precisely our ability to make choices, so choose to be happy.

2. Success and failure depend on only us, but not just its results, but mainly for how we interpret them.

3. If you believe that happiness is something that happens, you will be happy, for a while, for moments, on the other hand, if you believe that happiness is something that is part of you, you will be happy always.

4. Be or not to be happy is something that depends on our choices, from our point of view. Do not let your happiness be in the other hand, it is in your hands.

5. It is difficult to accept that happiness is our choice, because by this way, we have to accept that sadness is too.

6. Being sad is addictive; because in sadness we find a way to receive the love, compassion. Being a victim is comfortable.

Think ... Surely you have a friend who is always happy. Is it so because only good things happen to him? Does he have just a good luck and you just have a bad luck? Or is it just the way optimistic and happy with what he sees life?

Yeah my friends, I came to this conclusion after this brief insight:

Being Happy is not a privilege, it is a choice.

As Gandhi said:

There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the road.

Thanks!

Alberto Rosa