Three recent happenings involving happiness inspired this post. One was my writing on Facebook that many song titles and lyrics from the optimistic American generation, the 1930s and 1940s, could be inspiring and motivating quotes today. I know, we faced huge trials and tribulations during those years, The Great Depression and World War II, which merely proves something about resilience. A song that emerged from my memory banks is Get Happy, which starts with:
Forget your troubles, come on get happy, you’d better chase all your cares away.
Looking at “Get Happy,” I notice it can really refer to two different aspects of happiness. One is to obtain or receive it, but there is also the colloquial form of “get,” which means, “to understand fully,” as in “She really gets it.” I think it’s important to get happy as well as to get happy. How’s that for a confusing sentence? The second item on my list of three was a very popular recent quote of mine I put on Facebook:
Find the happiest person you know and spend as much time with them as possible. Joy is something that can rub off on you.
Hanging out with happy people will help you both understand what happy is all about, “get it,” and make it easier to create your own by seeing how the happy person does it, “get it.” Finally my preceding post on this blog was about Allen Klein’s new book, You Can’t Ruin My Day, which features a sentence which really says it all:
You can set out to have a happy day or not. The choice is yours.
When I wake up in the morning I have two choices. I can be happy or I can be unhappy. I’m not an idiot, I choose to be happy. NORMAN VINCENT PEALE,
So, looking back at the days of your life, have you mostly chosen to be happy, or have you been an idiot?
Jerry
