Saturday, September 17, 2011

Love and Happiness Through The Looking Glass

This journal entry is for anyone on the outside looking in.
I have recently become on the inside looking out.

The Choice
Something I did not truly internalize until recently in life:
Love and Happiness are CHOICES.
They are internal choices and not external situations.

The absolute definitions for Love and Happiness are defined by the self.
Nobody but you can tell you that your definition is wrong.

You can not control the weather, but you CAN control you.
You CAN control what you DO and how you FEEL when it rains.
And you can CHOOSE to be happy during the worst of thunderstorms.

Like Happiness, Love is a choice.
It is NOT a stroke of luck or a spell that is cast upon you by another.
When you are in love with somebody, it is because YOU are CHOOSING to Love.

That Love will serve you well as long as your accomplice is also a willing participant who CHOOSES to love you back. If there is such a thing as a soul-mate, then your true soul-mate will love you back.

Equilibrium Between The External and Internal
There are limits to how much our interactions can achieve and how much we can alter own way of thinking.

We have standards for Love and Happiness.
We can’t just love anything that comes our way or be happy about any situation that arises.
But the fact is that Love and Happiness are powerful universal NEEDS,
and life becomes easier when we prioritize those needs over our limitations.
"The happiest people are either very lucky or very flexible in their criteria for happiness."
-Matthew Y. Wong, Ph.D.
So our challenge in life is to find that equilibrium between how much we can change the world around us and how much we can change ourselves.

Unconditional Love and Happiness
Marriage is a promise to love, unconditionally.

The breakthrough that occurs in the transition from “Dating” to “Marriage” is the commitment to make the Relationship more important than the self as if it were... a third self.

There might be such a thing as a promise to be happy, unconditionally.
Perhaps this is the original promise that one can make to their first self.