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Life can be such a beautiful adventure — that is, if you give yourself permission to experience it.

Many years ago, I went on vacation for a week at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico. This resort offered sporting-type activities, which made it a unique experience for me. It offered yoga, volleyball, rock climbing, hiking — you name it; there was something available to meet the interests of almost anyone who enjoys being active and energetic. They even had a circus setup that let vacationers swing on trapezes and land on a net below. I couldn’t wait to give it a try.

I was very excited about this new kind of vacation, and when I arrived at the resort, I decided right then and there that I would try everything they had to offer at least once. I had a terrific time, with different experiences beckoning me from every direction. As you can imagine, there were some things I was rather good at, but others that I was quite bad at because I’d never tried them before, and I had no idea of how to begin. In the spirit of my unusual vacation, I threw caution to the wind and jumped right in anyway.

It was a really enjoyable vacation, but one thing really surprised me. A lot of people participated in only one or two activities the whole time they were at the resort, and if they weren’t familiar with an activity, or they weren’t good at it, they wouldn’t participate. This was true pretty much across the board. Everyone stayed within their own wheelhouse with a handful of activities that they did every day.

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with doing what you enjoy, especially on vacation. For many of us, our working lives involve following someone else’s game plan or instructions for an entire workday, and a resort vacation allows us to do our own thing, or to do nothing at all. I’m inquisitive, though, and I wanted to get to the bottom of this phenomenon of embracing one or two activities at the expense of dozens of others. That’s when I began to ask questions of my fellow vacationers. Why did they choose to do only a handful of activities, when so many opportunities for fun were available?

It pretty much boiled down to this: They liked doing the things they were good at, and if they couldn’t be confident that they would be adept at an activity, they chose not to try it because they didn’t want to embarrass themselves.

Imagine that. These people — a majority of whom were U.S. citizens — traveled out of their country to a resort where chances were they would know no one, and they allowed themselves to feel embarrassment at anticipated negative judgment of strangers. And incidentally, these were strangers who had their own lives and companions and vacations to focus on; strangers who very likely never gave them a second glance or thought, and if they did, it probably wasn’t one of scathing indictment. What’s more, everyone was in a place where they were invited and encouraged to let their hair down and try something brand new.

I suppose it’s possible that in other people’s eyes, I was embarrassing myself with some of the things I was doing. For me, though, the approval of others has never been a strong motivating force for me. I do things because I enjoy trying new things, and that’s how I manage to get the maximum enjoyment out of my life. I expect others have their own lives to think about, and it’s unlikely that they’re noticing my lack of skill on the volleyball court.

I want to relate this to life — our lives — because we’re here to get the most enjoyment we can out of life. When we do, life can truly be an adventure.

But for many, that isn’t true. Life for them becomes something to fear, or something that they’re just not willing to try because of what others may think, or because they fear they might embarrass themselves.

This is what I think happens: When we’re very young, we really don’t yet observe what others think about us, and thus we’re willing to try a lot of different things. If kids are raised in a comfortable environment, they are open to experimenting with new activities that lay before them. But as we get older, we begin to notice the comments of others about our behavior. If people don’t approve of what we do, they may share their opinion with us and look down on us.

The disapproval of others can have a lot of power over us. When we feel it, we are less likely to want to try that new activity or to fully embrace and explore our world. We start to get the idea that we should stay in our lane or stick with what we’re best at, and we begin to think that we should never allow ourselves to be seen as inept or not proficient at the things we do.

When we begin to observe what others think about us, it can affect our choices in life, and sadly, I believe it starts to keep us from living life well.

Think of life in this way: Life is like a week vacation at a resort, and there are thousands of things we can try during our week, metaphorically, living on Earth. Of course, instead of a week, we may actually have 80 or 90 years in which we can try whatever we like. There are so many things we can explore, we can touch, we can dance with — that’s life on Planet Earth. Has there ever been a setting more resplendent or more rife with possibility?

Sadly, we miss out on so many things because we do care what our behavior can look like to others. In the process of considering that, many of us can miss out on the chance to live our lives to our fullest capacity. 

I have a friend who loves to dance. She would be the first to tell you that she has no sense of rhythm whatsoever, and she never really knows what to do with her hands. She’s so embarrassed by what she looks like when she dances that she has taken to doing it only on those rare occasions when nobody, and I do mean nobody, she knows can see her. Once she stayed in a hotel where a conference was going on, and she left her room to go to the association’s yearly dance party, where she blended in with dentists or brokers or English professors — she wasn’t quite sure.

It’s sort of a cliché or a T-shirt slogan that we should “Dance like nobody’s watching.” But how about if we dance like we’re all looking upon each other with a soft, kind gaze, full of appreciation for one another during our short time here on Earth? These bodies and their movements are holy, and they were put here to move with wild abandon.

I believe life can be a beautiful adventure, with so many opportunities to try things, explore things, engage with others, and grasp opportunities that come our way. But if we live life in such a way that we are concerned with what others think or feeling embarrassed that we don’t do things very well, we can become inured to trying. Then, instead of sampling hundreds of things, we try only two or three.

Life is our adventure, and we are given just one chance to embrace it. None of us for sure know what comes after this life, but we know that this is the one we’re supposed to live well. Life can be such a beautiful gift. I know there are struggles we have and things we have to work through, but this doesn’t mean we can’t live life to the fullest, through exploration and the desire to learn and to feel.

I’m talking about the willingness to go for the gusto, and to do things “just because.”

Some of you may be wondering, “What about things that are harmful to myself or others?” We need to ask these questions:

1.     Does it hurt others?

2.     Can it potentially hurt ourselves?

Skydiving is a good example. If we do it enough, don’t we face an ever-increasing risk of experiencing a catastrophe? But this risk is still exponentially small. The existence of some risk doesn’t mean not to attempt skydiving; it only means that we should consider what it means to do so as we decide if we’re willing to take that literal plunge.

Something else many people try in an attempt to squeeze every drop out of life is recreational drugs. This, of course, is a choice made by many, but it’s important to think of the possible consequences of this decision. We could lose our jobs; our loved ones could turn away from us; we could lose our homes and end up on the street. This strikes me as very dissimilar to skydiving, a much less frequent activity that carries with it only a remote risk of harm, if we place ourselves in the hands of professionals. Drug users jump from their airplane sometimes multiple times a day, and whatever precautions they take may not protect them in the end.

Sometimes our actions have the potential to hurt others. That’s also a very good indication that these activities are not good things to do.

If we keep in mind these two considerations — whether it hurts others and whether it hurts ourselves — that can be a very good guide to what we should allow ourselves to do. It certainly makes more sense than entertaining an idea of what other people might approve or disapprove of, particularly when we consider that our ideas of their opinions may not even match the reality. There’s a chance that when we picture other people judging us for our actions, they’re not thinking of us at all. Even if they do have an interest in what we do, it’s very fleeting.

The thing we carry with us every day is our own thoughts. When we project a sense that others are judging us, chances are that we’re really just judging ourselves.

We have to be careful about what we think about ourselves, and we have to be careful about judging others for doing things they’re not good at, or things that are different from what we would do. If we judge others for their actions, we are more likely to judge ourselves, and that can keep us from doing what we can to live our life to the fullest. It is an exhilarating feeling to say, “Wow! I want to try that,” and then to give a new experience a go. That’s a much more enriching feeling than the anticipatory shame of failure.

The other day, a friend invited me to play Scrabble, a game I hadn’t played in a long time. When I did play, I remember that I wasn’t very good at it, and guess what? I still am not very good at it — but I enjoyed it immensely. Those activities we attempt don’t necessarily have to be about doing things well; sometimes, the point is to live in the moment and to stay vigorous and excited by life. We should be about exploring life and trying new things, even if we fear we may look silly to ourselves or to other people.

We should stop judging ourselves, but I want to close by noting that we should also stop judging what other people are doing. Life really is a beautiful adventure if we keep our heart open and we are willing to try new things. It can be hard, but if we are able to overcome our fear, we may discover that we are at a resort of a lifetime, and it’s called life on Planet Earth. There are thousands and thousands of things we can do, and each possible adventure is calling to us, saying, “Come, try us out.” If we do so, then in life, we can be explorers of all that the world has to offer us. This means that when we take our last breath, we can look back on our life and its pinnacle moments and say, “I lived very well.”

Try Something New

I hope that as you were reading, you thought of an activity that you might like to try — something fun you can jump into with both feet, just to experience the thrill of it.

Here are some ideas.

Physical challenges: Have you ever tried ziplining? Someone straps you onto a taut rope and you step off to coast over treetops and valleys. Other fun possibilities: skydiving, skiing, waterskiing, ice skating, trampolining, rock climbing, watersliding … the list goes on and on.

Natural experiences: Have you ever explored a cave? It can be exhilarating to step into total darkness, unsure of the dimensions of the chamber or what else may be inside. You can also try camping, stargazing, hiking, canoeing, rafting, hot-air ballooning, snorkeling, deep sea diving and more.

Relationship fun: Why not try speed dating or meeting someone online? If you’re in a committed relationship, try doing something brand new with your date — like axe throwing or roller-skating. Anything from a new location to a new lovemaking position can spice things up, and you won’t know how much you can enjoy them unless you give them a try.

Games and sports: Are you even aware of all of the ways you can compete against yourself or others and have a wonderful time? Maybe you’d like to hit a rifle range or join a softball league. Your gym probably offers everything from water aerobics to pickleball. If it sounds fun, give it a try. You may find an activity you can enjoy for the rest of your life.

I remember traveling with my friend a few years ago. Jim and I had been in Europe and we had landed in New York ready to take our connecting flight to Orange County. Upon arriving at JFK, we received the bad news: Our final leg home would be delayed eight hours. 

By this point in our travels, both of us were exhausted. Thus we weren’t happy hearing we’d have to wait for hours in the airport. We spoke to the ticketing agent to see if we had any other options. Unfortunately, there were none. So we were both stuck. From this shared point of being stranded in the airport, we made different choices. 

I decided to hop on a bus and ride into the Big Apple. With a few hours to kill, I thought I could enjoy the city. Meanwhile, Jim couldn’t snap out of his frustrated state. Rather than join me, he opted to stay behind and sulk; he was in no mood to have fun. 

I returned after my brief trip to the city refreshed and ready to hop on my flight home. Jim, on the other hand, was just as miserable as he had been eight hours prior. We arrived in Orange County at the exact same time, but how we felt as we flew home was completely different. 

This story illustrates one of the most important pieces of advice I can give you, as a licensed clinical psychologist whose clients come to me every day seeking help to navigate their life journeys. I call it the “happiness reset button.” 

Simply put, it’s our response to circumstances out of our control. When we’re confronted with something in our lives that we don’t like, we ask ourselves, “Is there anything I can do about (input your predicament here) to make it better?” 

If yes, by all means, we should pour our energy into doing so. 

If no, we press the happiness button, which means we accept what life has presented us. Period. We then let go of the outcome we wanted and replace it with wholeheartedly readjusting to the situation. 

Hitting the button is a straightforward concept. But my experience working with countless individuals and organizations over the years has made it clear that actually doing so on a regular basis—until it becomes second nature—is one of the greatest challenges you’ll ever face. 

In the example I started with, once I received news that my flight was delayed and there were no other options than to wait eight hours for the next one, I hit the happiness reset button. 

From there, I accepted my new reality, which motivated me to make the best out of an otherwise stressful situation. Meanwhile, for the time I was enjoying myself in Manhattan, Jim was stewing in frustration and most likely telling himself things such as “This is unfair,” “I don’t like this,” “Why did this have to happen to me?”  

On the scale of life’s challenges, I would rate my airplane delay as a low-level obstacle. The next example is more serious.  

When I was 14 years old, I went with my father to his company’s corporate office in Nebraska. He was there to attend a meeting. He dropped me off in Omaha, where he would join me after he was finished. When we met after his appointment, the sullen look on his face told me he had bad news. 

“Son, I’ve lost my job,” he said. 

I knew being laid off was disappointing and completely unexpected news for my dad. Up to that point, he had had only one job, and he linked his self-worth with his work. Despite his feeling like he was letting down the family by being unemployed, I could care less because I loved him deeply. But afterward, he fell into a depression that lasted years. 

He eventually found new work and reverted back to the dad I knew and admired. Had he hit the happiness reset button early on, he would have spared himself the unnecessary sadness that lasted nearly a decade. 

Now, how about when we’re struck with some of life’s whoppers? The death of a loved one, a divorce, infidelity, major illness, financial hardship . . . You know what I’m talking about. When these biggies strike, every other tough moment we’ve faced prior seems like a walk in the park. 

Even for those of us who are really good at pressing the happiness reset button, these tragedies really put our happiness to the test. 

I remember when my beloved dog, Einstein, passed away. I’ve always been a huge pet lover, but Einstein was a four-legged companion unlike any other I’ve had. For years, he would accompany me to work, we’d take walks together every day, and everyone in my family knew that Einstein was first and foremost committed to me. 

When he died, it was a loss about as deep and sad as any I’ve ever experienced. That day, I had one of the biggest and most cleansing cries in my life. The tears just poured and poured out of me and the sobbing was intense. Afterward, I felt much better, and although I have fond memories of Einstein, I have definitely recovered from his passing. 

When we experience a loss, grieving is important. Exercise, therapy, journaling, time alone, crying—there are just about as many types of grieving as there are circumstances to grieve over. We must find what works for us best and then spend time grieving. 

My recommendation is about an hour a day maximum. 

There’s a big difference between my expression of sadness that resulted in a deep cry that made me feel much better afterward, and crying for hours or days at a time, and only feeling worse. We should avoid the kind of grieving that only prolongs our suffering and invest in grieving that promotes adapting to new circumstances. In other words, we grieve so that we are able to hit the happiness button no matter what. 

So after our hour-a-day of grieving, we spend the rest of the twenty-three hours in our day living in the present moment. In the here and now, we focus on what is beautiful. It may be the outdoors, a smile someone sends our way, or an affirmation we’ve read. 

Whether the difficulty we face is mild or life-altering, the good news is, we have all the resources inside us, right now, to overcome nearly any obstacle we’re charged to overcome. Specifically, we all have a happiness reset button inside us. The difficult part is that a lifetime of habits and experiences have resulted in most of us having trouble accessing it. With practice, however, we will be able to reconnect with our innate ability to recover from nearly anything. I’ve seen this many times with clients in my private practice. 

As the saying goes, “The only constant in life is change.” While we rarely have a problem with change we deem good—a new beautiful relationship, a job we love, a new home, and more—it’s the bad change we struggle with. And here’s where the happiness reset button comes in. When we practice and become skilled at pressing it, we have learned one of the world’s greatest life lessons.  

Fear is such a powerful emotion. It has the ability to keep us safe, but for many of us, it keeps us paralyzed, and keeps us living to our fullest extent.

When our fears get out of control, we can shut down. They can paralyze us. But we’re here to live our lives well, and if we don’t deal with our fears and keep them in their proper place, then they can keep us from finding the joy in life that is the birthright of all of us.

I have a movie recommendation for you. It’s from 1991, Defending Your Life, starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep. The main premise of the movie is about fear. It takes place in the afterlife — where we go when we do — and the characters Daniel and Julie have to defend the lives they lived on Earth. Specifically, they are tasked with determining whether they faced their fears while they were alive, and if they did, they may move on, but if they didn’t, they must return to Earth to try again.

The movie is funny, but it also has a great truth: In life, we are faced with fears. The question is, how do we handle them? As I see it, we have two choices: We can face our fears and move on, or we can let them run rampant, destroying any chance we have for a contented and fulfilled life.

That’s what fear does. It takes away from our lives, while robbing us of the joy of living. Maybe right now, we are not living the life we want to live because of fear of failure, loss, or the judgment of others. We make so many choices in life because of our fears, but if we learn to honor them and deal with them appropriately, we can find that life is a beautiful adventure, and we can face it with fearlessness.

But in order to control our fears, we need to approach them rationally. It’s not necessary to live life with reckless abandon; instead, we can sit with the realization that if we take a certain action, we may experience a result that we don’t want to happen.

When I was growing up, a relative of mine was really into dirt-biking, and he had three sons who attempted to make it in that world. Two of his sons competed and did well, but as they reached adulthood, they found that they carried a lot of physical pain from the injuries they had experienced pursuing their sport. Sadly, his third son also tried to make it in dirt-bike racing, but one day while practicing, he came down from a high jump on the track and injured himself so badly that he died.

With all of our endeavors, we have to ask ourselves if the risk of an activity is worth its reward. Most of the risk we face is not physical, like my relatives faced, but it is emotional. We risk a different kind of hurt, and one that can be nearly as devastating.

There can be so many different fears. The fear of flying is a common example. Once, I was on a plane, and a woman in the back was having chest pains. Officials believed she was having a heart attack, but it turned out that she was having a very dire emotional reaction to her fear. I don’t know what came of this woman, but I do know that many people can never even think of flying because of the debilitating effects of their fear. If you really study flying, the chances of dying in a plane are miniscule — but don’t we all know someone who will never fly because of their fears? This has an impact on their lives and the people around them.

Likewise, if we spend a lot of time keeping up with world events by watching the news, we can be overcome by our fear. We are inundated with fears, and if we’re not careful, these can overwhelm us and truly take over our lives.

I suspect you’ve heard of the condition called agoraphobia — a fear of being in certain situations where escape feels impossible. Some people think of it as a fear of crowds, but it’s a little more complex than that. People who have agoraphobia may be fearful in a crowded market, or they may feel panicked on a freeway while surrounded by cars. Instead of facing their fears, they stay closer to home, until finally they are stuck at home — some never to leave home again because of their fear. About 1 percent of our population lives this way — stuck at home, for perhaps the rest of their lives.

The movie I mentioned, Defending Your Life, depicts the great variety of fear that humans face, and some of them come back over and over and over again because they never succeed in beating out what it is they dread. Fears are powerful. Fears control us. Fears take away from our joy and happiness in life.

Maybe you don’t know someone who has agoraphobia. Let’s face it; those people don’t get out much. But don’t you know someone who is making decisions that keep them stuck in life because they are fearful of embracing change? Perhaps they’re at a job that they hate, but they’re afraid to quit because of the consequences? Or maybe they’re fearful of pursuing their life’s passion because they’re afraid of what others might think? 

There are many ways that fears control us, yet they don’t have to, if we just do a few things. One of the things we can do to begin to overcome our fears is to face them. We can look our fears straight in the eye, no matter what they are, and say, “I’m not going to let you control my life.”

Many years ago, I developed a fear of driving on high overpasses because I thought I might crash and die. But I knew that I wasn’t afraid of death. This allowed me the courage to look directly at that fear and say, “OK. If I die on an overpass, so be it.” I realized I could handle the result of possibly having an accident, crashing, and dying from a high overpass, so I decided to go ahead and stop avoiding those situations. Guess what? The fear went away.

We look at the fear and we say, “I may not want that to happen, but I can do that,” and then can go away. I know how hard that is to do, but it can work if we allow ourselves to try it.

Some fears are quite a bit more complex than a fear of heights. What if our fear is that my teenager will start using drugs and die? Or that the person I love will fall in love with someone else and leave me? Maybe I fear that I’ll end up unable to care myself and stuck in a nursing home, or that I’ll lose my job and everything I own and end up homeless. Our fears can be very scary. Mostly, they never come true, but having them can keep us from living.

We have a choice. We can be afraid, or we can face our fear and say, “I can do it. I definitely may not prefer this to happen, but if it happens, I’ll be OK.” We can assure ourselves that we can handle the consequences.

If we tell ourselves that something can’t be allowed to happen, then we are gripped and paralyzed by fear. But if we say, “I would prefer that this outcome not happen, but I can live with it if it does, and I will get by,” then that fear has lost its grip and its power over us.

Mind you, I’m not suggesting that we think about fear all day long. Rather, when fears kick in, we can just tell ourselves that we can do it, or that we know others who have gone through this and come out the other end and are doing fine.

What will happen is that fear will have nothing to hang on to, and it won’t have any way to feed, and the fear will lose its power and will have to go away. This doesn’t mean that we don’t prepare; it means that we prepare wisely and without the fog of fear standing in the way of our reason.

Another thing we can do is quit feeding our fears, whether externally or internally.

An external fear is one that we are fed by outside influences, like the 24-hour news cycle or worrisome acquaintances who are always imagining worst-case scenarios. 

We must ask ourselves, what are we watching on our news or on our apps? What kinds of conversations are we having? If we are consuming nearly nonstop content that feeds our fear, or if we are continually imagining and discussing the worst possible outcomes from any situation, our fear grows more and more powerful.

We need to limit ourselves and stop accepting fear from others. Instead we can anticipate beautiful adventures and positive outcomes, and then watch them come our way.

As I mentioned, fear can also be fed internally, by our own negative mental picturs of possible outcomes. We need to remind ourselves that negative self-talk is not helpful. The solution to this kind of thinking is to be fully present in the moment and to give our attention to the beautiful things in our life. It can take time to break these fears, but when we spend time with them, we do well. In time, we can become fearless.

In the movie I mentioned, Julia is someone who spends time fearlessly. Daniel, on the other hand, is full of fears, and he has experiences tragedies and losses in life because he gives in to his fear.

We can have such beautiful lives, but we must focus on having fearless lives. The rewards we receive are beyond measure.

You Can Change Your Thinking

I know many people who think that they can’t change their mindset, and so they are stuck thinking the way they always have. They are quick to label themselves with words that supposedly define them: I’m a pessimist, they might say, or even worse … I’m unlucky.

I always wonder why people feel so married to negative outcomes that they would want to identify with them so completely.

The people I know who own the label “pessimist” like to explain that if they imagine the worst possible outcome, they can never be hurt by what happens, from a breakup to a job loss to a financial catastrophe. When the crisis is averted, these people can acknowledge that they dodged a bullet — for now. But any time now, the bad outcome could present itself, so they’d better not let down their guard.

Similarly, the people I know who consider themselves unlucky are always willing to recount the wrongs they have experienced and the bad results that stack up like firewood outside of their door. I don’t know anyone who is entirely like the biblical character Job, who is depicted as accruing loss after loss, of everything, because of a cruel game being played by divine forces. Don’t most of us get the occasional win amid the losses? 

Of course we do. But if we are in the habit of constantly tallying losses because we feel that our worst fears have been recognized, it’s hard to see the gains, or at least it’s hard to see them in their glory.

If you are in the habit of looking on the negative side of any situation and of predicting dire outcomes, here is a challenge for you: Just for a short time, why not flip the script?

If you are in the habit of making only dire predictions, this could be a real challenge for you, but why not give it a try, just to see how ineffective and time-wasting it can be? (I’m winking here, if you can’t tell.) Here’s what to do.

1.     Choose any risk in your life. Take your pick; all of our lives are full of risks, or what someone with a sunny outlook might call “chances” or even “opportunities.” You might think about the smallest possible thing, like your drive to work, or you might think of something with a higher risk-reward ratio, like asking someone out for a date.

2.     Make a list, mental or on paper, of the five best possible outcomes of that situation. Be authentic — even hopeful in the process. What are the ideal outcomes of driving to work? You could get there unscathed. Or, even better, you could get there while missing out on traffic and make great time. Or, better than that, you could see something beautiful that you’ve never seen before on your route, like some lovely flowers along the way. List five things.

3.     Ignore that other list, the one you make routinely without acknowledging that you’re doing so (example: That person won’t want to go on a date. They’ll probably say something mean to me. Maybe I’ll get pepper-sprayed …). For the purposes of this activity, you are not allowed to make that list for the risk you’ve chosen.

4.     Shortly after making your list of possible bright outcomes, do the thing. Take the risk, such as it is. 

5.     Assess your results. How did it go? If you made an authentic list of possible bright outcomes, did any occur? Or did some occur that were not on your list? Often, we find that we experience blessings and benefits we never thought possible if we only open the door to them — and if we only look around to try to see them.

Maybe that activity worked great for you. Do you know that you can do that every day, with everything you do?

It’s possible that activity worked terribly for you, and something awful really did happen. In this case, I’m wondering — would giving in to fear have helped to produce a more positive outcome? I don’t believe it would have. As a bonus, you got to dream a little, and positive expectation is infinitely superior to dread.

I wish you well as you continue on your path to happiness, and I would remind you that happiness and fear tend not to travel the same roads. I welcome you over here with me on the side with sunny expectations and the brightest hopes, because joy is a journey, and you’ll know its road when you see it.

In the early eighteenth century, mathematician, astronomer, and general polyglot Isaac Newton offered his famous three laws of motion, the first of which is the most familiar. It states, basically, that a body in motion wishes to remain in motion, and a body at rest wishes to remain at rest, and either body will contentedly do so unless an outside force acts upon it.

It’s called inertia, that tendency of something to move or stand still unless another force acts upon it. 

We understand inertia as a basic concept of physics, but if we have ever been in a predicament, we probably understand it as a way of thinking as well. The word is often used in this metaphorical sense. We blame our own inertia when we stay in a job, a relationship, or a setting that no longer serves us well.

I once had a person I was working with, and she was just too busy. Her business was causing her suffering in her relationships and her emotional life, and it was even causing her physical pain. My advice to her was not something brand new that she had never heard before; her friends had been telling her the same thing for a long time. Anyone could see that she was too busy and she needed to slow down.

It’s this way for many people. We keep going, going, going, and in doing so, we often fail to stop and smell the roses and enjoy the beauty that life has to offer.

She left our session with her typical response: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She wanted a different answer, a different option, but deep down I think she knew that slowing down was the right choice. She just wasn’t willing to accept it yet.

The next week she came to me and she had a harrowing story to tell. She had left my office and been driving down the freeway at a high rate of speed because she was in a hurry, as usual. All at once, the semi beside her blew out a tire. It very suddenly swerved into her lane, and she slammed on her brakes just in time. That truck came within mere inches of killing her.

Because the universe sometimes likes to offer messages that are far from subtle, when she looked up at the side of the truck’s trailer, she saw written in big, bold letters the words, “Slow down.” It was the same message that I and other people had been sharing with her, but now she was ready to receive it. She had come to a dead stop, almost literally so, and she didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.

That woman’s life got a lot better after that point. She received the message, and she found ways to get out of both the literal and figurative fast lanes.

Not everyone is quite so lucky. I know of another woman who sought counseling because she was in a dysfunctional relationship. The man she was dating had beaten her many times. The man was in jail but was getting out soon. My colleague told her that she absolutely needed to stay away from her for her own safely. This was a situation that could end poorly, perhaps with injury or even death.

The woman didn’t like that answer, though she had heard it many times from many sources. This beautiful woman had been told by many people to stay away from her boyfriend, but she didn’t like that answer, and she decided not to follow it.

It turns out that the man she was in a relationship with was released from jail, and this woman picked him up and took him home with her. That same day, he ended up killing her.

When we have struggles, we want answers. Often, however, the answer is very clear. It’s inside of us, and we might even see it — but we choose not to acknowledge it, because that’s not an answer we’re ready to accept yet.

The answer to our problems can be obvious to everyone around us and even to ourselves, but we still reject it. We want a different answer.

Sometimes we suffer horribly for our refusal to acknowledge the clear answer to our problems. Occasionally, as with my colleague’s client, our refusal can cost us our lives. Sometimes it can cause unhappiness, but aren’t we here to have a good life? Happiness is our purpose and our birthright. We deserve it.

When we face a problem, we need to take a moment to define it. What exactly are we struggling with? Whether it’s a relationship issue, a career issue, a psychological or spiritual issue, or something else entirely, we need to take stock of it as soon as we recognize that it exists. Time is of the essence if we are to get back to the important work of cultivating happiness in our lives.

After we define it, we must start gathering information about it. What is the potential solution? What can we do to solve our problem and move on from it?

There are many steps we can take to pinpoint a solution. Here are some that I have found success with:

·      Talking to friends

·      Talking to professionals 

·      Reading books

·      Journaling

·      Making a pro-con list. 

·      Looking into our own mind.

There’s a funny thing I’ve noticed about finding the right solution to a problem. It never seems foreign or unexpected. The fact is, you usually know the right thing to do, and if you listen to your own still, small voice, the answer will be right there waiting for you. The solution is almost always readily available inside of us.

If we make the decision our heart is advising us to make, we will find that our lives keep getting better and better. We’ll keep finding ways to make our lives more beautiful, more happy, and more peaceful, every single day.

Let’s take a moment to consider the words of one of America’s most prominent and esoteric philosophers, Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau is best known as a New England Transcendentalist when spent the years 1845-47 living on the outskirts of society in a small cabin in the woods by the side of Waldon Pond. He called this period of his life an experiment of intentional living. 

In a chapter of the resulting work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods,” titled “Where I Lived, And What I Lived For,” Thoreau writes this famous paragraph:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life ….

There is great wisdom in Thoreau’s purpose here, and I think it’s very useful to ask ourselves a key question that drove him to take up residence by a secluded lake: What would our lives be like if we sucked all the marrow out of life? In other words, what would it mean for us to live life to fullest capacity that we are able — to embrace life more richly — so that when we take our last breath, we say, “That was a good life.”

We don’t have to be adherents of 19^th century philosophy to have heard this famous quote of Thoreau’s. If it sounds familiar, it may be from watching the film Dead Poets Society, a movie with a lot of deep wisdom in it. The film is about young men at a boarding school as they prepare to do good in the world because they have the privilege to bring about change. Their English teacher, played by Robin Williams, tries to convince them that they should live life well now instead of believing that they will find happiness after they reach certain goals.

Williams quotes Thoreau’s wish to “suck all the marrow out of life” as he tries to convince his students of the importance of grabbing life by the horns. And it sounds like good advice — but how do we do this? We must attempt to live our lives in such a way that we can suck the marrow out of life, so that when it’s our time to die, we can say, “I lived well”?

Sucking the marrow out of life sounds simple enough, but as a matter of fact, it may be the must difficult thing that we can ever do. But it actually is as simple as it sounds — though “simple” is not quite the same thing as “easy.”

Living life well means living every moment like Thoreau did at Walden: deliberately. Why is it such a struggle to live each moment well? It’s because life presents us with so many distractions from that target.

I can think of three barriers that often keep us from living our best lives. 

·      Desire for things. We are constantly brainwashed that things will make us happy, and so we become willing to sacrifice so much to attain the physical objects of our desire. 

Maybe we want a beautiful new house, or a fancy car, or expensive jewelry — fill in the blank. But we forget the specter of hedonic adaptation, a concept I’ve introduced here before.  When we get the things we wanted so badly, we find that we get used to them very quickly, and then the thrill they brought to us fades away. We still have the objects, which didn’t have the lasting power to provide us with the joy we anticipated, but we also have the bills from their acquisition, and we have to work hard to pay the back, often at a job we hate. The truth is that objects very seldom bring lasting joy.

·      Addictions. Another factor that can stand in the way of our happiness is the shadow of addiction in our lives. This addiction may be to drugs — the first thought that comes to mind when we speak of addiction — but there are so many things we can become addicted to, like food, or sex, or substances, or relationships. 

With addictions, we begin to feel that we need these things to just to live, but ironically, we can stop living in our desire for the next hit. What happens is that we numb ourselves to ourselves. When we are no longer in touch with who we really are, we’re definitely not living — and we’re definitely not sucking all of the marrow out of life.

·      Another factor that keeps us from getting the most out of life is our desire for approval and fame. This is one of the main messages in Dead Poets Society. The young men in the private school where Robin Williams’ character teaches have the potential to accomplish so much in life, but in the process of always looking for fame and glory, there is the danger that we will stop living. In order to seek approval from others, we fail to find a sense of approval within our own spirit.

There are many other barriers to sucking out all the marrow of life, and most of them, like the three I mention, are barriers that we erect in our own life path. But if we are wise, we realize that these barriers lead to pain and suffering. We can buy the thing that entices us, but it won’t matter in the long run, because we will grow less infatuated with it once it’s in our possession and we’re left to pay for it. And we can come home every day to smoke a joint or have a drink or three, but soon we’ll realize that giving our bodies a constant stream of substances is the path to suffering. And if we seek glory, don’t we sometimes find that we’re giving away our lives to others instead of living well now?

If today we do decide that it is our sincere desire to suck the marrow out of life, what should our first step be? I think it lies in realizing that we have undergone many, many years of condition ourselves not to put our life’s happiness first. But when we become aware that we are missing so much out of life, we can decide that we want to make changes.

When our intention is to change the focus of our lives and start living for the joy of it, our best move is to start small. When we get home from work at the end of the day, for instance, we can bypass the television or our handheld devices and head outdoors, where we can just sit and listen to the sounds of nature. Or we can head to a local park, where we can go for a walk to see the beautiful things that lie in our path. If we are having a meal, whether a sumptuous spread or a modest supper, it is always within our power to take it slowly and really feel, taste, and savor the food before us.

Sucking all of the marrow out of life is all about living in the present moment. Instead of comparing now to the future or the past, we can command ourselves to stop giving our lives away.

We all have a lot of habits in place, and becoming savorers of life is not something that will happen for us overnight. Few of us can easily do like Henry David Thoreau and get away from it all in the wilderness. But let’s remember, this wasn’t easy for Thoreau, either. He had to make preparations and rearrange his life to meet his intentional goal, and then he met it so beautifully, and he told us about it so generously. His example would be a wonderful one to emulate.

Even so, you don’t need a cabin in the woods to live an intentional life that brings you pleasure and teaches you about the world. I know that when I was in college, I had a drive that was similar to those of the students in Dead Poets Society. I wanted to make a difference, to, and to pursue fame and glory.

One summer, I worked hard every day to save up enough money for my goal, which was to spend the following summer in Europe. I managed to meet my goal, and for three months I traveled all around Europe, both by bike and by rail, and I learned so much about the world. One thing I learned was that most people in Europe don’t work 40-hour weeks, and almost all of them got six weeks of paid vacation at their jobs. Here in the U.S., most of the people I knew worked 40, 50, or even 60 hours in a week, often sacrificing weekends, and if they were lucky they got two weeks off after a year of employment. It’s hard to suck all of the marrow out of life when your nose is so firmly attached to the grindstone!

Spending time in other cultures helps us to take an assessment of our own influences, and upon returning from Europe, I was able to observe people I felt were living well. What I noticed was that they weren’t attracted to fame, wealth, or addictions; instead, they were attracted to life — to living well — and they didn’t care what others thought of the because they were focusing on the present moment.

We can live well, and we can do it in our actual houses — no Walden Pond required. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that it takes commitment and effort to do so. We’re not going to get praise for watching the sunset; no one is watching, and chances are no one would care. If we win a major award or buy a beautiful home or car, someone might notice or care. Even so, we must stay focused on the realization that the experiences of life can be so beautiful when we pursue them instead of chasing external prizes.

When we live in the present moment, we realize that we can suck all of the marrow out of life by living well now. This takes effort, and we need to be kind to ourselves as we begin to change our focus. We may be in a job we hate; we may be addicted to food or substances; we may be working hard for glory. Whatever our condition, when we realize it’s time for change, we can make that commitment and start working toward it. The results will be beautiful if we can allow ourselves to achieve them.

To suck all of the marrow out of life, we can make small changes, every single day. We can leave our office to go outside and enjoy our lunch in the sun. We can take a longer vacation without pay, just to being to enjoy our lives. We can even change our life circumstances, trading in a showplace of a home for a more modest, affordable one, for instance, to reduce some of the financial stress in our lives and spend less of our time working ourselves to death.

With time, we can create the environment that best allows us to suck all of the marrow out of life. This is possible for any of us, if only we commit to it, work toward it, and really make it our goal.

When living our best life is our goal, we will find little steps along the way that will truly be exquisite, and we’ll keep having more and more of them. Ultimately, with enough of these beautiful moments, we’ll have to admit, when we reach the end of our time in this body, that we have lived a beautiful life.

If today were the day you took your last breath, would you be able to say that you sucked all of the marrow out of your life? If so, congratulations on a life well lived. If not, at least metaphorically, isn’t it time to go to the woods and live deliberately?

If today is my last breath, I sucked all the marrow out of life.

By Dr. Robert Puff

I don't remember how young I was, but I do remember the first ballet I ever went to. It was called The Nutcracker, and it centered on celebrating Christmas with children. I remember sitting in the audience watching the ballerinas, and thinking that they make that look so easy. They're so effortless in their movements. How do they do that? (I could tell, I couldn't do that). But it was truly beautiful watching them expressing their art form. It seemed so effortless, so spontaneous, so beautiful. But if we know anything about the art of ballet dancers, we know that a lot of work goes into getting to the point of being so beautiful in their work. A lot of hours went into getting to a point at which they could be effortless. But when they reach that point, it truly is a magnificent performance. But when they actually do the performance, at that point, they can't be thinking, “I need to put my right foot here, or my left foot there.” They would trip and fall very quickly if they did that. It reaches a point where their dance becomes truly spontaneous because they don’t consciously think about it anymore. They just set the flow, and it is something worth watching because it's so beautiful.

Most of us will never be a ballerina, or if we are one, we won't be one for the rest of our lives. Our bodies just can't maintain that type of rigorous performance. But we're here to learn about how to be happy. And I do believe that the principles that are employed in training to be a ballerina are very similar to the principles we should employ in finding happiness, and peace. And the final outcome of training to be a ballerina, again, is very similar to the outcome of the steps that we need to take in order to be happy.

I'm going to argue that happiness, and peace are both spontaneous, and effortless. When we're born, and we're young, our happiness is natural. It simply flows from us. We see something beautiful, and we admire it. We see something funny, and we laugh. We see something new, and we explore it. It’s spontaneous, and young children don't have to expend any effort in order to be happy. Of course, they can be sad too. But even that's effortless, their emotions just flow. So what happens? Why does that change? The really big thing that catches us, and prevents that spontaneous flow of happiness, is that we are taught very young that in order to be happy, certain things have to happen. Not only do they need to happen, they need to keep happening. So our internal happiness becomes external.

Instead of just relying on and being happy, we look at extremely defined happiness. And because life isn't permanent, because life changes, we lose that spontaneity. And now, the world has control over our happiness instead of us just naturally finding happiness in being alive, but then, life happens. We're told that in order to be happy, we need to reach certain goals. We're told that in order for life to go well, we have to behave in certain ways. We're told that other people's opinions of us really matter. We're told that if we reach certain things, and have certain things, then we'll be happy. We're told that there are bad things out there, we need to be afraid, we need to be careful. And then, bad events happen, and they're scary, and they're frightening. We start going inside ourselves, putting up walls, and that natural happiness gets deeply buried inside of us.

Going back to my ballerina analogy, I know it's hard to imagine this, but imagine we're born as natural ballerinas. We come out, and we can do the ballerina thing really well. We're really good at it. But as we get a little bit older, people start criticizing us, people start telling us how we can do it better. People say, “Well, I know you're really good at it, but it's kind of silly, just do something else, just do this instead.” And people make fun of us, people poke at us, people tell us other things are better.

We have experiences that are pretty cool, and we all want more of that. Instead of simply dancing, we dance for the performance. We dance for the praise, and instead of spontaneously dancing, and for that ballerina performance, we're doing it for the opinions of others. There are many ways that life affects us, and takes away our spontaneous, effortless flow of being a person; of being a happy, peaceful person. So, what can we do? Is it all hopeless, is it all pointless? Of course not, that's why you’re reading this post. But the point I'm making is that it requires effort, and I want to discuss the four stages of effort.

When we learn something new, we go through four stages. The first stage is knowing nothing. For example, let’s say you want to learn Japanese, and you don't know one word of Japanese. You are just ignorant of Japanese at that point.

In the second stage, you become a learner. You're beginning to learn Japanese. You are a learner, but you're not yet incompetent. Then you reach a point where you can speak Japanese quite well. It isn't natural, it doesn't flow from you, but you're pretty good at it. And in most situations, you can communicate. You still need to work at it but you can communicate; that's a big stage.

The final stage is where you don't even think about it. It just flows from you. You start dreaming in Japanese, and you don’t even pause to think, “what does that mean in Japanese?” You count in Japanese. Everything you do becomes a natural flow, and is effortless, spontaneous. Those are the four stages of learning anything. So let's apply this knowledge to our happiness, to our peacefulness. Again, right now, we may be very far away from that goal of finding spontaneous happiness in our life.

So, the first thing we have to do is say, “Okay, I get it. I want to learn how to be happy.” Once we start exploring how to be happy, we're going to learn things, and it's going to sink in. That would be stage two. And then we're going to reach a point where we become pretty good at it, and it just kind of flows from us. But it still takes work. We still think about it.

But the final stage we're looking for is really learning how to be that childlike, spontaneous, happy person, and it just flows from us. It doesn't take effort. We just respond in ways that truly make our lives flow well. And it is effortless, and it is spontaneous, but it took a lot of work to get here because we had to work at it. At its core, it’s merely reconditioning ourselves into a happy, peaceful person. Of course, any of us can do it, at any time, no matter how old we are. But of course, it can take a lot of work if you've taken yourself off the market right now, and you’re a pretty angry upset person. You may have to spend quite a bit of time unlearning things, learning new skills. And that's great news, you really can get better at this.

But today’s post is about one clear message, our goal should be to be spontaneous, and effortless in our happiness, in our peace. It should just flow from us, it shouldn't be work, it should be our natural response to almost everything that happens. If we get caught up on the freeway, we very quickly just smile. If we lose a job, we very quickly say, “Oh, I wonder what new adventure is going to come.” If we’re outdoors, and we see a bird singing, we notice it and we just smile. It's very spontaneous, it's effortless; we just flow with life, and life becomes beautiful. But the key is that our goal should be to reach a point where we are effortless, and spontaneous in our happiness, realizing that once we get there, like a ballerina, we do need to keep working at maintaining that skill of effortlessness, and we can do that. I will keep saying, to the day we die, it isn't something that we do for a little while, and then stop. It’s something we work at, we work hard, and once we get there, we maintain it.

But for a moment, imagine with me what it would look like to truly be free. To be free of anxiety, free of worries, free of fears, free of even desires that things have to be different for us in order to be happy. We discover that happiness just spontaneously arises out of nowhere periodically, and there it is. We burst into joy for no reason. We find peace when all around us seems chaotic. We see beauty when others see darkness. It truly is a beautiful way to live life. It's a worthy goal.

And the other news I keep sharing is that we can all have it. We just have to keep working at it. And remember the Japanese analogy I used earlier? It's much like that. Initially, it's going to be tough, because learning a language can be hard, and with time, we're going to get good at it. It's going to flow pretty naturally from us. But if we keep working at it, we're going to reach a point where there is no effort. It's effortless, it’s spontaneous, we just speak Japanese with no problem. This is exactly the same thing. We reach a point where life is beautiful, and it flows well, and we can do that. We just have to realize it takes work. But if we work at it, we truly can have beautiful lives.

Did you happen to see the movie A Beautiful Mind? It was released in 2001 to great critical success, and it won four Academy Awards, including best picture.

The main character of the film, played by Russell Crowe, is John Nash, a real-life mathematician who actually won the Nobel prize, as the movie depicts, and also suffered from schizophrenia, as Crowe masterfully interprets.

Schizophrenia is a terrible mental illness that involves hearing and seeing things that aren’t actually there. People with schizophrenia believe that what they are seeing and hearing is real. Typically, these hallucinations are extremely negative ones that center on the person with the illness. Nash, for example, heard voices in his head that told him constantly that he was a failure. Even though the world saw him as a great success, Nash could not believe that this was true because of his schizophrenia. Not even distinguished positions at some of the world’s greatest universities or accolades as high as the Nobel Prize could convince him otherwise. Part of Nash’s hallucination was that he was a failure, even as he was admired throughout the world.

I share all of this to explain the importance of our thoughts. Whether they are positive or negative, our thoughts are powerful. They matter. They help to determine the course of our lives. Even if the whole world disagrees with our thoughts, we are going to follow what we know inside to be true, even if, like John Nash, there is a more enlightened and accurate way to see ourselves. Thoughts have their own energy, and they take off, if we let them.

I once read a study about models. Some of the most beautiful people in the world are models, yet when asked if they consider themselves beautiful, this researched revealed the surprising fact that most did not. Most models felt they were average, and most reported being dissatisfied with some noticeable flaw to their appearance. Gracing the covers of magazines and walking the world’s most elite runways didn’t shake these models’ views that they were ordinary, or even less than ordinary.

It’s possible that you’re reading these examples, and you’re wondering what these words have to do with you. You may be thinking, “I’m not a supermodel or a brilliant mathematician. I’m just an average Joe.” I won’t try to convince you otherwise, because the bottom line is that you’re absolutely right. We are always right, and whatever we think about ourselves is true and correct. When John Nash said, “I’m not good enough,” he was right. When supermodels say, “I’m just not that pretty,” they’re right. Our thoughts control our perception, and there is no sense trying to convince someone with negative thoughts about themselves that they are wrong.

It’s possible that you are someone who takes affirmations very seriously, and you look into your mirror every day and make a positive statement about who you’re going to be or what you’re going to achieve. That’s a great practice, and I encourage it. but I’m not talking about what we are going to be. I’m talking about what we see right now when we look at ourselves in the mirror, whether it is real or metaphorical.

Whatever we are feeding our minds, that’s what we are. Our thoughts are so powerful that they actually do shape our reality. Never mind the fact that they may have nothing to do with what’s true or apparent to others. What we feed our minds is what we believe, and what we believe is our truth.

I have been fortunate to travel around the world and I’ve paid close attention to the people I’ve encountered. The people in different places in the world experience different standards of living from one another and from many of us who live in the United States. Billions of people throughout the world live in comfortable but modest living situations and share their homes with their family and even their extended family.

In Egypt I met a man who was a dentist, and he was excited about the fact that he was going to be married. He was planning to put up a sheet in his apartment to separate a small quarter reserved for him and his future wife from the space occupied by the rest of his extended family. He was very happy at the prospect of his future life. Although he was a dentist, he did not yet make a lot of money, and this modest arrangement was one he could afford and one that brought him thoughts of joy.

Can you imagine a practicing dentist in the United States being satisfied with this arrangement? We have so much more here than many people in the world possess, and yet we don’t feel like it. What we have doesn’t make us happy because we compare ourselves to those who have more. It is our mind at work again, giving us a message that we receive as the truth, despite what the experiences of most others throughout the world would make of our interpretation.

I don’t want to focus on whether our thoughts are right or wrong. Rather, the important takeaway is that our thoughts matter. What we are thinking throughout the day? These thoughts determine the quality of our lives and even the outcomes of our actions.

Perhaps we go through the day recognizing that we don’t have as much as someone else, or that we don’t have enough. Or perhaps we think very differently, and we go through the day feeling gratitude, joy, and thankfulness because we have been so richly blessed. Either thought is true.

If we feel we do not have enough, we suffer. This is true, even if in the world’s eyes we have everything we could possibly need. The root cause of our suffering is not what we have or don’t have, or what we’ve accomplished or not accomplished. At the base of our suffering is our thoughts about our lives

What we are feeding our minds throughout the day will be our reality. This is true even if our reality is madness. What we are feeding our minds matters.

It is important to note that schizophrenia is a genetic disorder that is normally treated with medication. John Nash didn’t like the effects of the medication that he experienced, so ultimately, he decided he’d live his life and train himself to ignore his hallucinations. That was certainly a risky choice, since schizophrenia can be a life-threatening mental illness. But nevertheless, the power of our thoughts is amazing, as Nash’s experience demonstrates.

It’s important to assess what we are feeding ourselves in the form of our thoughts. What is our mental and emotional diet? Is it helpful? Is it beautiful? Is it helping us to have beautiful lives? If not perhaps it’s time to stop paying attention to them, or to change them, or to let them go.

The first thing we have to do is discover what it is that we are thinking about all day long. This involves a straightforward assessment without judgment. We must take a walk past the metaphorical mirror and take a look. Maybe we are saying, “I’m bad, “I’m ugly,” or “I’m stupid.” Do we like these feelings? Probably not. So let’s focus on something else.

John Nash could still see his hallucinations, but he made the remarkable choice to focus on what was real. If our thoughts are hurting us, we should focus on other things. If our thoughts about ourselves are negative, they will only lead to suffering. If we are to live happy lives — and obviously that is our goal, since we are meeting here in the space — we need to take control of the thoughts that hurt us.

The thoughts we experience have to do with all parts of our lives. Maybe we focus our attention on our looks, our success, our health, or even where we live. All of factors things have the ability to cause us to suffer if we allow them to, or if we go on wishing our lives were different.

I live and work in southern California. Public transportation here is not the best, and most of us get around by car. When we get a car, usually we love the feeling. We can get ourselves around from place to place and be productive while doing what we enjoy. But then we get on the road, and we can’t help but notice that others have nicer cars than we do. We might think, “My car is ugly” or “I hate it.” These are the sorts of thoughts we create all day long. But we have a choice in the thoughts we express or believe.

I work in the city of Newport Beach, which is one of the wealthiest communities in the world. No matter the car you have, there is always one that is nicer, and it is our tendency to look at the nicer cars and make a comparison. We do this with so many aspects of our lives. We think we are not good enough or we are not pretty enough, and this can cause us to suffer, but there is really no need to. We can just as easily look at ourselves and our lives and even our vehicles and say, “I am so grateful for what I have.” Our sense of peace increases when we realize the power of our thoughts.

One final step we can take is a hard one, but so worthwhile. I talk about it often, so it may sound familiar, but it is this: Stop paying attention to your thoughts. Instead just be. Instead of shifting your attention to positive things, just live in the now, and really savor each moment and each breath. We don’t need to label everything as good or bad. Rather, we can choose to experience each new breath with wonder as if we are experiencing it for the first time. If we think about the car analogy, perhaps we can stop thinking about whether our car is pretty or nice or fast, and instead we can experience it as if it is brand new and we are driving for the very first time. We can say, “Wow! I have a car!” And we can exhilarate in the feeling of the wind whipping through the windows and the speed with which we get from here to there.

When we look at our car, we can choose to see an experience a car — just a car. It is a mechanical wonder, and having one opens up the doors of many possibilities for our lives. What an amazing thing!

In the very same way, we can look in the mirror and see a person. Wow! What a marvel of creation! What a glorious presence! We don’t need to see ourselves as tall or short, fat or thin, accomplished or otherwise. We can choose to live well, one breath at a time, just as we so beautifully are.

Sometimes the world seems to think highly of us. Other times, it does not. But I’m making the choice just to suck the marrow out of life. When we need to shift our thoughts to something else, we can — or we can just enjoy the presence and stillness of living life one moment at a time.

Thoughts That Bring Joy

Have you found yourself in a spiral of negative thinking that seems to zap the joy from your life? You can change your thinking (though I hope you’ll hang on until the next section, when I offer contrasting, and I believe, better, advice!).

Take up a position in front of your real (not metaphorical) mirror. Look at the dear person there! You know everything this person has experienced. You know how hard they’ve tried. You know what has brought them joy. You know what has hurt them.

You know what jolts this person from sleep in the night, just as you know their happy hammock daydreams. You’ve been through a lot with this person — so why have you been spending so much time thinking about the shape of their nose or the chip in their teeth or the contour of their waistline?

Try to picture this person as a tiny baby — perfectly innocent and unblemished, new to this beautiful world. Can you love this person that way? How about as a toddler? A first-grader? A freshman in high school? At some point, you decided to judge this beautiful creation, but you don’t have to. That infant is still there, barely able to focus. If you stare long enough, you’re certain to see a smile.

Nothing in the mirror matters. Not the color of your eyes or hair. Not your cheekbones. Not some softness under your skin. But if you look closely enough, maybe you can see that innocent baby and recognize that its goodness and potential is still there. Don’t stop looking until you catch a glimpse.

Joy That Brings Joy

All of that stuff I said about looking in the mirror? You don’t need to work that hard. The best thing you can do for yourself takes far less effort than this. I invite you to close your eyes and take a breath deep inside, to the bottom of your belly, and let it out with an audible sigh.

Take another, and hold it for a moment, then sigh it out again. Then take another.

With each breath, focus only on the breath — how it feels in your lungs, in your limbs, in your head. Don’t even think about it; thinking is what got you into this situation. Just feel and be. Your body is a marvelous machine. It is the best car on the lot, because it transports your lovely spirit from here to there. Revel in it. Take it for a spin.

Imagine it’s your birthday, and your friends and family pool their money to get you the best gift you can imagine: tickets for fabulous seats to see your favorite musical act. You get to the venue, you find your place up front, and then you settle in to experience every aspect of the music you love.

You’ve followed the performers for years, and you know every song. The acoustics are perfect, and you’re accompanied by the kind of friend who enjoys listening wordlessly so that you both can give the performance your undivided attention.

It’s possible that something will distract you for a moment or two. Maybe you’ll need to go to the bathroom or shift your balance in your seat, or you might get hungry as the night moves along. But for most of the performance, you’re having a wonderful time. In no way do you wish for it to finish; in fact, you would not hurry a single note.

Because you’re so engaged, the inevitable small annoyances don’t bother you much. Instead, you enjoy the entire concert, and you’re fully present for it throughout.

What if you got to the venue and something terrible had just happened to you? You’d been broken up with, say, or you learned of a dire financial problem. Maybe you got a bad diagnosis that signals possible suffering on the horizon. Even while facing the prospect of extreme difficulty in your life, you are so thrilled to see your favorite group that for a couple of hours, you are able to put all of that behind you.

As humans, we have been given a wonderful gift, and that is the ability to suspend our fears, concerns, and worries and really focus on what we love. In the example of the concert, we know that when the music ends we may go back to our fears and worries, but while it’s playing, there is nothing we can do about them, so we might as well just give in.

How do we do this? How do we suspend our worries and completely immerse ourselves in the music? The answer is that at the time, we’re 100 percent present with the music, and we allow everything else to fade from view. And why wouldn’t we? There’s little we can do from our auditorium seat, and a lot of effort and positive energy went into getting us where we are.

Sadly, for many people, when the concert is over, their worries and fears come rushing back at them. For these people, their mental chatter becomes impossible to ignore, and they tune out the music of life.

Life always has its music, and we don’t need to be front-row center at a concert to hear it. Throughout our lives, no matter what else is going on, a melody is present, but often, we are so focused on the present moment that we fail to hear its strains. The noise of our worry drowns out all the other things we might otherwise hear and enjoy.

So why do we stop listening to the music of life? What happens to block it from our consciousness?

Despite my concert analogy, life’s music can be subtle. It may not be super loud and totally captivating, aside from its peak moments. Often instead, it’s a quiet whisper, but it’s always there, always speaking to us, always drawing us in. It’s just that our thoughts get louder and louder, and only during an extremely loud performance of life can we stop listening to our thoughts.

One thing we can try to do is focus in on the music of our lives and let our negative thinking fade into the background. Life is always speaking to us — it is! We become beautiful observers of life because life is always playing its music for us, and the music is beautiful.

I really love classical music. Sometimes it’s very loud, insistent, and intense — but other times, it’s just a small whisper. The loudness or softness of music is expressed in notation as dynamics, and these can range from pianissimissimo, written as three small Ps and meaning very, very soft (a mere whisper), to fortissimissimo, expressed as three small Fs and meaning very, very loud — thunderous! Or the music may be merely loud, forte, or soft, piano.

Life is like that. The real extremes can be rare; generally, life’s lovely melody is playing below the surface, and it is so beautiful — but we have to really listen to hear it. That can take true focus, and so often we become distracted from it. It’s like going to a concert and having someone sit behind us, kicking our chair or talking nonstop in our ear. “You should think of this!” the voice says. “Stop listening to the music! Deal with my worries!”

If we want to do well in life, it’s important that we keep listening to the music. Yes, we’ll have to go to the bathroom; we’ll have to eat something. But through it all, we need to keep listening to the music.

Sometimes we see a performance, and then afterwards, maybe the next day, we read a review. Someone else attended and paid close attention before offering a breakdown of what they heard and whether it was good or bad. What a mistake it would be to go to a live performance and engage in commentary the whole way through! Our commentary can keep us from truly hearing; it keeps us outside of the full experience. We would never put up with a fellow concert-goer screaming in our ears about what’s right or wrong, or what we should worry about — our future or past anxieties or desires. That’s ridiculous concert behavior. It robs us of a treasured experience, and it’s not fair to the musicians.

Whatever is being performed in front of us, we need to focus on it — that is, we need to really listen to life and soak in its beautiful aspects. The truth is that there is always something beautiful to be with. Life has that ability. We can be in a hospital room to deal with a life-or-death medical situation, but still we are able to hear birds singing outside. Life is always playing its music.

The key to listening is to learn to stop being distracted by our thoughts and really work on our attention. We need to constantly practice soaking up and enjoying the music of life, even when we have become accustomed to not listening.

Developing listening skills takes focused attention, but I’m here to tell you that it isn’t difficult. We just need to listen with our senses. 

How do we listen with our senses? We pay exquisite attention to the information that they are processing. If we are eating, we take in the aroma of the food, and we feel its texture, and we taste it on every part of our tongue — sweet, sour, salty, bitter. We pay attention to the total experience and everything that makes it so very much worth savoring.

And it doesn’t end with our dining experience. We can hear the music of life at other times, too. When we talk to someone, we can really listen to what they’re saying. We can watch their facial expressions and their movements; we can see the emotion in their eyes, or we can gauge the tone of their voice. We all convey so much more than what our words say, and by immersing ourselves into the conversation, we can tap into the beauty and meaning that are always there for us.

When we are working, we can discover life’s music by using full concentration for the task at hand. Whether we are doing high-level administrative tasks or we are collating and stapling documents, there is music, just below the surface. Sometimes when I am engaged in a seemingly mindless chore, like signing a stack of letters, I let myself get into the rhythm of the job, and at these times, it is like I am not just hearing, but contributing, to life’s music.

Likewise, when we take a shower, we can do more than stand there and think of our day’s things-to-do list. Instead, we can focus wholly on the shower. We can feel as we lather up our skin, or we can feel the water going onto our head and our bodies and enjoy the sensation of the cleansing suds. Really paying attention to a rich physical sensation like this one can awaken us to the constant melody of life.

And there’s even more we can do. While lying in bed, we can feel the sheets and enjoy even haring our breath as it makes its faint noise. When we walk, we can look at the things all around us as we feel the pavement beneath our shoes.

We can become magnificent listeners to life, with enough practice — and let’s face it, this is something we were born to do, so the skill is there, waiting for us to employ it. We can tap into the music, and when we do find ourselves distracted from it, we can use kindness to bring us right back. It is as simple as saying, “OK, I’m distracted again; I am going to start listening again.” This may work for a few minutes, or it may wear out after a few seconds, but that is when we again employ kindness as well tell ourselves, “Now I’m going to listen again.” Soon, we will find that we have to redirect ourselves less and less, and we hear the music more and more.

Over the years, haven’t we gotten skilled at being distracted from life’s music as we focus on life’s obligations, chores, emotions, and concerns? This is only natural — but it’s not inevitable, and it doesn’t have to be permanent. Gently guiding ourselves again to the art of listening is all we need to tap into that sweet music we’ve been considering. It just takes practice to redevelop those skills. In the early going, it may feel like effort.

I remember when I first started trying to access the music of my life. I would go for walks and really try to see what was around me. It was an illuminating activity, but I found it hard to stay fully present. When I would see something and realize I’d been too distracted to fully take it in, I would step back and really look at that plant, that bird — whatever it was I’d passed by without fully embracing. Through the practice of quieting my mind, meditating, and paying attention, I did get better at paying attention to the music of life.

Quite simply, it’s a skill, and one that develops with focused effort. If you were a baseball player working on your fastball, you would understand the need for repetitive action and attention to get it exactly right. If you were a rock guitarist trying to master a riff, it would be the same situation: You would not begrudge yourself multiple attempts, and you would find degrees of satisfaction each time you got a little closer to your goal. So why would you not regard yourself with kindness as you try to master this skill? You’ve been walking around with a secret symphony playing, just for you. Only you can hear it, and even then, you need to work at it if you are to perceive it at all.

If we see the wisdom of listening to the music of life, we need to acknowledge its presence and give space to it. We must stop being in our head so much, and in doing so, we’ll find that life truly does become beautiful.

In summary, listening to the music of life is work, and it requires practice. Life is always paying music, but we have to listen, and we listen by being present. We can do this. We just need to realize and engage with the music of life that is always playing, but when we do this, we’ll discover that the symphony inside of us is magnificent, if only we can find it in us to stop and listen.

Hearing the music

Close your eyes and listen. You can finish reading this in a few moments. For now, take a full minute and just tune in, and be prepared to report back on what you hear.

*

If you’re like me, at first you didn’t hear much of anything — but the more you listened, the more you heard. Sometimes it’s a little astonishing to realize how noisy our bodies are! We have breath sounds, gastric rumbles, and, with close attention, there it is: the galloping drumbeat of the heart as it pushes blood through our veins.

How funny. We thought we couldn’t hear the music of life, but it was literally inside of us all along. We are its percussion section.

If you were to close your eyes again, you’d notice sounds beyond the body — ones that are always there, even when you’ve turned off the music, turned off the TV, put your phone on “do not disturb.” Your air conditioner or heater keeps a beat. Your refrigerator fan kicks gently on and off. Maybe you hear the hum of electricity — a sound you don’t even realize is present until the power goes out and you hear other sounds instead, like the road outside your house.

The music of life is composed of actual sounds, but it’s also composed of something beyond perceivable sound, kind of like a dog whistle. There is a register beyond your perception, and that is what you must learn to hear if you are to get the most out of this phenomenal life.

The point is that there is a lot going on, in and around you, and removing your attention from the things that have you tied up in knots can help you begin to perceive it. If our goal is happiness (and isn’t that why we’re here?), there’s a soundtrack that can help us to find it. I encourage you to lean toward it — to catch a snippet of melody here or there.

Before you know it, you’ll be humming along, attuned to every note.

Sometimes life can feel like an emotional hurricane with everything blowing around us. It can feel as though we will topple over and be destroyed by the strong winds of life’s turmoil. We feel like we’re in an hurricane or a tornado when life is blowing all over the place. Whether we are going through a divorce or we’ve lost a job, it’s easy to get stuck in a strong wind of emotion.

On a global scale, humanity faces famine, war, poverty. Whether it’s on a personal level or a global level, it can be overwhelming facing the hurricanes of life. We may ask ourselves, can we survive a hurricane and come out strong and healthy. 

You may notice that the strong trees that defy the winds often fall when the winds grow too strong. The plants that are upright and stiff fall down. But the palm trees are able to bend with the wind and stand upright the next day. 

This metaphor of bending with the strong winds instead of fighting them can apply to the hurricanes of life. How do we navigate life when the strong winds come? There are two parts to surviving the hurricanes of life: 

Part 1: We can bend when the strong winds come. When we stand up straight, we’re fighting the winds.

For example, we can work very hard at a company, put in our time, and feel we’ve been a good employee. If the company lets us go, it might not seem fair just like it might not seem fair when a hurricane is coming. Losing our job feels like the strong winds are coming. When we fight the winds too hard, we break just as the trees break when they don’t bend.

We know people who didn’t bend when they lost a job. Perhaps they turned to alcohol or gave up – they broke. They never got over it. But we also know others who bend. Maybe they don’t get over it right away, but they eventually move on.

As another example, we may get married, buy a house, and live our dream. But then our spouse asks for a divorce, or our spouse dies. Some people stay angry or stay depressed. They never get over it. Others meet new people and create a new life. They bend. 

We can bend or we can break. We can’t stop the winds. So many things are out of our control. What are we in control of? If we’re like a stick, we’re going to break. When the strong wind comes, are we going to fight it?

Part 2: When the winds are over, we can stand up straight again and enjoy the sunshine all around us.

Let’s take it another step further - when a hurricane comes, enjoy the bending. Enjoy going through the hurricane. We have a smile on our heart during the hurricane. This is possible. Every hurricane can turn into something beautiful if we don’t lose hope.  

We can ask ourselves questions:

How do I turn this into something beautiful? What can I do to make this work for me and make it better? We can tell ourselves I didn’t see that coming, but I’m going to do this. I’ll take six months off and travel. I’m going to learn a new skill. I’m going to visit my family. We can be miserable. Lots of people choose that. Other people choose something else. In the bending, find joy. Bounce back and return to who we are. 

A tree has a specific look to it. When a strong wind comes, the tree is going to break.

When we’re stiff like a stick, we tell ourselves this isn’t right. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. Then, we break. We see this in others. They lose their job. They get a divorce. We can be these people, and really make it our focus. The bending and the bouncing back comes from a flexibility.

We can’t stop the force of a hurricane. Sometimes everyone around us is going through a hard time. We can be like the palm trees and the grass and bend and bounce back. We can tell ourselves I’m going to make this work no matter what. We can remind ourselves this is a very strong time I’m going through. I’m going to bend. And I’m going to bounce back.

For example, if we’re in the hospital, we can enjoy friends visiting. We can enjoy the flowers people send. We can tell ourselves I’m going to give 100% of my attention to this situation.

Even when the hurricanes come, we’re going to bend, and we’re going to enjoy the bending. Life is good – this is a choice. This is an active choice. 

We can tell ourselves I’m going to flow with life, not with the crowds. There’s always beauty even during the hurricane. Believe there’s always hope. Work on your belief every day. Sometimes, we can be with that beauty even if it’s only one breath at a time. 

Have you ever wanted to learn something? Think of anything you’ve had a desire to do well at — piano, lacrosse, cooking, yoga. We can learn just about anything if we have a good teacher who knows the subject well. Like that teacher, we, too, can get good at things.

Years ago, my son had an interest in learning the cello. We started to look for someone to teach him, and we found someone locally who was a renowned cellist — someone who had once played for the Queen of England, but who was also willing to teach, and was good at teaching, too, with patience, understanding, and skill.

My son has since abandoned the cello — I hope temporarily, though life often sends us down new and different paths than the one we set out on. But through his teacher, he learned to make beautiful music.

When it is our desire to learn a new skill, we seek out teachers, and it’s really helpful to find the very best teachers we can. Mastering a craft through this kind of tutelage is easiest when three things are in place: passion, a little skill, and excellent instruction. Even if we don’t have that second part, the natural talent, I still think we can get really good at something through emulating our mentors and trying hard — with the more skillful the teacher, the better.

Imagine if Ludwig von Beethoven were your son. Who would you find to be his teacher? Ludwig’s parents found him a good one: Joseph Haydn, fresh off a triumphant voyage to London from Vienna, where both teacher and student resided.

Now, it’s not necessary for your teacher to be one of the greatest practitioners around. You can learn a lot from anyone who knows something you want to learn, providing they’re willing to teach. If someone has something to impart that will help us to reach our goals, we owe it to ourselves to at least ask them about it, but maybe even to form a student-teacher relationship that can get us where we want to be in time.

When it comes to happiness, I really don’t think there’s much difference when it comes to gaining that mindset, which is also a kind of skill. I think we all know people who appear to be naturally happy, but even with these people, there’s a lot of work to cultivating sustained happiness. It is worthwhile to ask them how they do what they do.

Teachers help us to get good at what it is we wish to achieve. It’s possible to reach our goals without them, but that way is far more difficult than picking the brain of someone in the know. If we want to find contentment and happiness in life, we need to find the people who are living life well, and we need to go to them and sit at their feet (figuratively speaking) to listen and learn.

Living a peaceful and happy life isn’t easy, but our happiness people may come from many different places and sources. At this point, you may be wondering where to find them. The good news is that you’ve found this article. I have been studying happy people living contented lives for decades, and I have some valuable information to impart from my years of observations and study. Look at you — you’re already studying! That means you’ve taken a first step, or maybe by now, after reading several of my writings, you’re even further on your way to reaching your life goals.

Our teachers don’t have to be far away or hard to find. Anyone who appears to be happy can tell us how they arrived at the sense of contentment that is clear to everyone who observes them.

To find a happiness teacher, look for those people who are doing life really well.

When I was younger, I was very healthy and fit, and I noticed that many other young people were, too — but I also noticed that people don’t always stay this way. I wanted to stay healthy and active throughout my life, so I decided to ask others how to do so.

Once I was backpacking with a group of people in the High Sierras. We were hiking 12 miles a day with 50-pound packs on our back. On this trip, there were some older hikers who participated right along with the rest of us. Of these, three people were in their 70s and one was in his 80s, and all of them were in great shape.

I asked these older hikers what their secret was to be in good health later in their lives, and they all told me the same thing: they had worked at it and worked at it, all throughout their lives, and as a result, now they could enjoy the kind of vigor that allowed them to pursue literal peak experiences, like a mountain hike.

What I came to understand from talking to these teachers was that I can’t very easily get back in shape when I’m 60. Instead, I need to stay in shape all my life. Their good advice and example have helped me to stay very fit and healthy all my life. These are my teachers, and they’ve helped me to shape my life.

As we navigate through life and we see someone doing well, or doing something we’d like to emulate, we will do well to take notice. Note that it isn’t things we’re looking for as we seek out our happiness models. They may have a beautiful house, a sharp car, or an expensive boat, but these things aren’t what make them happy. Happy people can be found at all walks of life. We should instead be looking at people’s lifestyle or way of living. We’re looking for people whose lives seem to be going very well in a way that makes them visibly contented.

Here’s an exercise to try: The next time you are on an airplane, take a good look at those people who are sitting in business or first class. Do they seem happier? In my experience, they don’t appear to be any happier or sadder than people sitting in coach. What we can buy doesn’t seem to be an actual qualifier of happiness. Happiness is a lifestyle — a way of living — and we’re looking for those teachers who seem to have attained it. These people can be found anywhere.

Another one of my own teachers is a person I used to go hiking with. This woman loved nature, loved the outdoors, and I never once saw her get angry.

I asked her about this, and here is what she told me: “I get angry, but I always pause before I respond to people who make me angry. This allows me to respond in calm instead of anger.”

My teacher found that staying calm was a truer route to happiness than blowing up and venting her anger. She told me that getting into fights takes work, and the results of the work were not conducive to her happiness. Instead, she decided to work at cultivating calm, and this was the work that paid off. What I learned from this teacher was that if I wanted to have contentment, I would need to pause and not always express the feelings I had inside of me.

Another teacher I had was a client of mine. This person was very spiritual, and she asked me, “Do you know that the number one thing we can do to develop our spirituality is meditation?”

At the time, I was an intermittent meditator, and I had learned from Dr. Herbert Benson, the great mind-body connection expert at Harvard University, that the chief benefits of meditation were physical — reducing blood pressure, decreasing anxiety, helping with memory and sleep.

At the time my client mentioned the benefits of meditating, I found that I liked it, but I didn’t make a lot of time for it. I did some looking, and I found out that my client was right, and there were spiritual benefits to meditation, in addition to the physical ones. I dove in with gusto, and I am happy to report that I’ve been meditating regularly for over 30 years.

When I was in my senior year of university, I took a seminar on the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow is considered one of the preeminent American psychologists, and if you have ever heard phrases like “self-actualization” or “peak experiences” (I mentioned this one earlier in this article), then you are familiar with his groundbreaking work. 

The fascinating thing about Maslow is that he was a psychologist who did not study pathologies. Instead, he researched the people he found that he considered extremely healthy and he wrote books about them. He studied health. I remember being introduced to his work and thinking that this is what I wanted to do, too. I realized that living a healthy, beautiful life was possible, and I was going to learn everything I could about it. In this way, Maslow was one of my teachers. Learning about him was like being given a ticket to a concert hall and hearing a beautiful melody and deciding the experience was so beautiful and moving that I was going to play it for myself someday.

If you’re reading this article, you have a deep desire to learn about happiness and to find contentment and peace in your life right now. Otherwise, you’d be off doing something else. I can tell you, discovering and cultivating happiness is possible, but it does take some work. I’ve been working at it my whole life, and it has paid off: I am happily living my best life, and I intend to keep doing so.

We have the idea that if people’s lives are going well, they’re just lucky. This isn’t true. I once met Mr. Rogers — Fred Rogers — and his wife, Joanne. Mr. Rogers had a very loving persona on his children’s television show, but anyone who knew him would tell you that he was who he was on TV. He didn’t go home and act differently.

I remember Joanne saying, “You know how he gets this way? He works at it every day.” I was surprised. Mr. Rogers was Mr. Rogers through hard work; he wasn’t born that way. He worked at it, and he worked at it hard.

People like Mr. Rogers do things to ensure that their lives go well. That kind of lovingkindness and contentment are the result of effort and attention. It’s similar to meeting someone who is extremely fit. Guess what? This person is doing things to stay physically fit and healthy, just as we can “work out” to stay emotionally fit and healthy.

Happiness does take effort, but there are a lot of things we can do to make our lives better. As one example, I meditate every day for at least 90 minutes. This is a practice I have taken on, and it’s one that fills me with calm and reassurance. There is a sacrifice of sorts, however. The hour and a half that I spend meditating each day takes away time that I could spend doing other things, but many of those things aren’t good for my soul. Meditation is, so I keep doing it. I make time for it every single day.

Throughout our lives, we’re going to meet people who just shine. If we are wise, we will approach them to find out how they got to that point in life, and then they can be our teachers.

All through history, there have been great thinkers who have lived their lives very well. If we are people of faith, we might look to our faith leaders as teachers. A Buddhist may look to the Buddha’s example; a Christian may think of the life of Christ. There are examples throughout our faith we can emulate. I know that I like to consider the life of St. Francis of Assisi — a beautiful soul who lived simply and close to nature.

Another wonderful example is Ramana Maharshi, a Hindi sage and liberated being, or jivanmukta, who taught that our real nature is happiness. He was a gentle, beautiful soul who loved people, and many would gather around him just to watch him and listen. Even children were fascinated just to look at him.

When we choose a teacher, like any of those I’ve mentioned here, we don’t just learn from them. We learn to be like them. There are so many wonderful teachers throughout history that we can learn from. We just need to listen to our heart and pay close attention to who is drawing us to them. When we hear their story, we can then say, “OK, this is what they did. How can I do that, too?”

One thing I teach over and over is that we can have beautiful lives. It takes focus, attention, and work — but it’s so worthwhile. Why shouldn’t we learn to shine, just as our teachers do?

How do we do that? We must commit to living the life we seek and then never give up. Then maybe someday we’ll be teachers for others in their journey toward peace and happiness.

Exercises

Would you like to learn about living a life of happiness and contentment? It can feel daunting to approach a possible teacher (though it shouldn’t; most people are very flattered when others take notice of and interest in their lives). Here are some ways to access teachers of all kinds:

·      Read. You can choose a book of philosophy, a book of poetry, a holy text — but try to find work that will provide inspiration. Reading the work of teachers who address the kind of life you want to live will help to spur further thinking and learning in this direction. Teachers don’t have to be in front of you for you to learn what they have to impart.

·      Observe. If in your life there is a person who seems to have things right, pay attention. Watch that person’s expressions, postures, focus; listen to that person’s words and note how they interact with others. You can learn a lot from merely watching.

·      Journal. Grab a notebook or a piece of paper and, using the entire sheet, write down the names of people you have observed who seem contented. Circle the names, and start listing some of the qualities of each person in the space around their name. Do you see some trends (example: two or three different people share the trait of patience or of being able to laugh at themselves)? Draw lines and make actual connections between these people and their traits.

·      Make a list of questions you would ask a potential teacher. If you have a conversation or you don’t, this will help you to pin down the source of your curiosity and the attributes that draw you to that person.

·      Invite your possible teacher for coffee and conversation. Or reach out via email. Be honest; tell the teacher that you’re interested in living a good life, and you think they may have some wisdom to impart. If the person doesn’t have time to meet, sneak in a question — perhaps one from a list you made in the previous step.

You can live a good life. Why not devote part of today to pinpointing a teacher who may be able to help? A beautiful life doesn’t happen by accident. Start today to cultivate the life you want and the one that you deserve.