INTRODUCTION
“Life is difficult,” were the opening words of distinguished author and psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, M.D. in his monumental book, The Road Less Traveled. Dr. Peck accurately points out the harsh reality of life, and no amount of sugar coating can change that reality. But, life can also be very good, at least part of the time, and whether or not life is good, depends more on how we think about life than about the actual circumstances of our individual lives.
Growing up on an Indiana farm, I began doing a lot of thinking about life at an early age. Like everybody else, I wanted to be happy, so I started trying to figure out what I could do to make life better. My mother and father were very different in the way they thought about life. Mom always saw the glass of life as half full, whereas Dad saw it as half empty. My mother had more than her fair share of troubles. Yet, she managed to be reasonably happy a great deal of the time. She lived to be 94, and she was the most loving person I have ever known.
Happiness is a state of mind, or a way of thinking about life. We cannot change a lot of the circumstances of life that we find ourselves in, but we can change the way we think about life and those circumstances. Abraham Lincoln once said, “I think most people are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” I believe Lincoln hit the nail squarely on the head with that statement. Our way of thinking about life is more important than the circumstances of our lives in determining how happy we will be.
About 19 years ago, I felt an urge to start writing down on paper some of my thoughts about life. Out of that urge, Contemplating Life, my self-syndicated weekly newspaper column was born. The first small newspaper to carry my column in July 1994, still publishes it every week, 19 years later. The essays are designed to inspire and comfort readers, as well as to stimulate some deep thinking about some very ordinary ideas. Letters from my readers over the years have convinced me that my essays do give comfort and inspiration to many.
My first collection of these essays, in book format, is Thought Boosters. In the hope of reaching many new readers, I am making this Kindle book available for a short time at an introductory price of only 99 cents. If it is well received, I will publish additional collections of the more than 900 essays that I have written over the past two decades. If you like the essays, and would like to see more become available, please let me know by posting comments in the review section.
I am including the first five essays from the book in this introductory article. If I receive a lot of positive comments, I will probably add additional free essays to the list periodically.
One
“Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.”
—Kahlil Gibran
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a beautiful garden on a warm and bright summer day, with singing birds and colorful butterflies propelling themselves from flower to flower in search of the sweetest pollen. How does such a scene make you feel? Does it stimulate feelings of happiness, tranquility, and peace of mind? It does for me.
Now open your eyes and reflect on those feelings for a moment. Then, close your eyes again and imagine the very same garden on a cold and dark winter day. The flowers are all dead, there are no butterflies, and the only bird you hear is a scolding blue jay. How do you feel in this setting? Do you still feel happy and tranquil? I’m guessing that you do not.
What you have just experienced is probably the closest we can come to making an analogy to the difference between a life filled with love and a life where love is absent. Love is the sunshine of life. Where love abounds, there will be happiness, tranquility, and peace of mind, except during those times when these feelings are overwhelmed by personal tragedy. Where love is absent, there will likely be feelings of emptiness, anxiety, and darkness.
The difference between a life filled with love and a life where love is lacking is very much like the difference between a warm, sunny summer day and a bleak winter day. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.”
Noted psychologist, Dr. Joyce Brothers, said, “Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable.” When you love a person, that person’s happiness is absolutely essential to your own happiness. You care as much, or more, about the other person’s happiness as you do about your own. You don’t try to make a clone of yourself out of them. You love them for who they are and don’t try to change them to be more like yourself. You give to a person whom you love without necessarily expecting them to give you something in return.
Two
“Nothing can bring you happiness but yourself.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
We all want to be happy, but many of us have a mistaken notion about what happiness is or how to attain it. Happiness is not wealth, fame, or fortune. Happiness is not a possession to be prized. It is not a problem-free life, or a certain set of circumstances. Happiness is a state of mind, a way of thinking..
Dale Carnegie, author of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, defines happiness this way. “It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” If Carnegie is right, then there is nothing anybody but yourself can do to make you happy. Other people may be able to bring about changes in your life, either positive or negative, but nobody else can determine your thinking. Thinking is like breathing. We all have to do it for ourselves.
Thinking is a very private thing. There is no way that any one of us can tell for sure what another person is thinking, and we certainly cannot change what they are thinking. If they are obsessed with negative thoughts or thoughts of hate, we cannot change that. Only they can change their thinking. We can say and do things in an effort to influence the thinking of others, but we have control over only our own thinking.
The power that thinking has over our behavior and our mood has been recognized for centuries. William Shakespeare wrote, “It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” Buddha said, “What we think, we become.” And Mahatma Gandhi, the great pacifist who led India to its independence, wrote, “A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.”
Thinking is not the sole product of the mind. It begins with the heart where one’s feelings lie. Once the heart has dictated the conclusion, it commands the mind to provide the reasoning that will defend that conclusion. What passes for thinking in some people involves nothing more than simply rearranging their prejudices. I don’t believe that such people can be happy until and unless they relinquish their prejudices and replace them with feelings of love. Once love becomes a part of their lives, they will find that their own happiness depends on the happiness of others.
Most of us have active minds and all sorts of thoughts come to us. We have no control over the thoughts that enter our minds, but we do have control over the thoughts that dwell there. Thoughts that are useful to us and others should be encouraged, but negative thoughts should be banished. When it comes to thinking about the past, we need to frequently weed our memory gardens. We should cling to those memories that make us happy. But memories that hurt us or others should be relegated to the deepest areas of our subconscious minds. We should try to learn from the words of Marcus Aurelius, a Roman philosopher who lived eighteen hundred years ago. He said, “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
Three
“One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve."--Albert Schweitzer
We all want to be happy, but most people who actively seek happiness are less likely to find it than those who do not seek it. That seems paradoxical because, for most things, the harder you seek them, the more likely you are to find them. But happiness is different. It a lot like a butterfly. As long as you chase after it, it is always just beyond your grasp. But, if you sit quietly for a while, it may come and sit on your shoulder. Those people who set happiness as a primary goal in life, rarely find true happiness, because happiness is not compatible with selfishness. Those people who place a high priority on serving others are not directly seeking happiness, but it usually comes to them nevertheless.
Albert Schweitzer, the great humanitarian, and medical missionary, knew about the relationship between service and happiness from his own personal experience. In addition to his service as a medical doctor, he was also a noted theologian, organist, and philosopher. When he won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, he used the money from the prize to expand his hospital in Africa. He was totally convinced that the only people who find true happiness are those who have found a way to serve others.
Perhaps the greatest myth about happiness is the notion that it comes from acquiring material wealth, power, and status. People tend to think that, if they just had a bigger home, a newer car, more money, or a higher standing in community, they would be happier, and, to some extent, that may be true for the short-term. But material wealth does not bring permanent happiness. Once people get the things they thought they needed to be happy, they begin to yearn for still more material things. They do not receive nearly as much satisfaction from the material things as they thought they would get, so they set their sights still higher in the hope that the next round of acquisitions will bring them the ultimate happiness that they seek.
Instead of focusing on personal happiness, some people set their sights on being productive, caring, and loving members of society. They hate social injustice and suffering, and they dedicate their lives to trying to make this a better world for everybody. Such people never give much thought to their own individual happiness because they are too focused on others. Nevertheless, such people are usually quite happy. Happiness is a state of mind, not a destination. People who feel they are using their lives to further the happiness of everyone seem to automatically find happiness themselves.
Four
"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."--Epictetus
The above words were spoken nineteen hundred years ago, by a Greek philosopher, who was born a slave, and lived a simple life with few possessions. However, those words are just as true today as the day they were first spoken. These words are at the very core of my own personal philosophy of life, and I do not believe that anyone can find true happiness until, or unless, they reach the point where they can focus most of their attention on the present and on those things that are under their control.
A major source of worry and unhappiness for some people involves regrets about things that happened in the past. Worrying about the past is an exercise in futility. The past is over and done with, and there is no way that any of us can travel back in time and change anything that happened. There are a few things we can do that might ease our regrets. If we have done something that hurt another person, we can apologize and try to make amends. If we made a bad mistake, we can try to learn from the mistake so that we will not make the same mistake again. But most of the things that happened in the past are totally beyond our power, and we should try to push the bad memories as deep into our subconscious minds as possible.
Worry about the future is another burden that too many people carry around with them. They want guarantees that they and their loved ones will live long happy lives with a minimum of problems, but, since there are no guarantees in life, some people try to substitute worry for the guarantees that they cannot have. Worrying about the future is almost as futile as worrying about the past. The best we can do is to use the law of averages to outlaw our worries. Most of the things we worry about never happen. It is true that any person, who is alive and well today, could suddenly die tomorrow, but it is not very likely to happen, and I think we have to operate on the assumption that it will not happen. If our assumption turns out to be wrong, then we will have to deal with the consequences when they come. However, we will all face enough real trouble in our lives that it does not make good sense to borrow trouble.
Some kinds of worry can be productive. Worrying about our health should motivate us to live a healthier lifestyle and practice preventive medicine. Worrying about a potential accident should cause us to exercise greater caution, which can reduce the likelihood that we will have an accident. And being aware of the possibility that there could be a financial crisis in our future, should motivate us to be a bit more careful about how we manage money. Worries that motivate us to take action that can reduce the possibility of misfortune visiting us are good worries and just plain good common sense. But, worrying about things that are beyond our control, accomplishes nothing except to diminish the quality of life.
Five
“Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Life is an ongoing journey of unknown length. We know not how long we will live or where life’s journey will take us. However, one thing we know for sure is that we will face, and have to adjust to, change throughout our lives. Nothing stays the same, and we cannot just stay in the same place, no matter how comfortable we are with the present. Seasons change, friends move away, loved ones die, and we grow older with each passing day. But no matter what happens, we can always be sure that the sun will rise again and a new day will dawn tomorrow for those who are still here to enjoy it. We will have periods of joy and periods of sadness throughout life’s journey because that is the way life is. Hopefully, the periods of joy will outweigh the periods of sadness for most of us, but nobody has a trouble-free journey through life. We have to learn to take life the way it is—not the way we want it to be.
When I lived in Indiana a common expression was, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a little while, and it will change.” Life is a lot like the weather in that respect. If life is stormy, the storm won’t last forever. After the storm, the sun will shine again. And when the sun shines, we need to make every effort to enjoy life’s beauty, God’s love and our love for one another. Life is truly for the living, and we must make sure that the death of loved ones does not rob us of the capacity to continue to love and to enjoy life. We can’t do anything for those who have already passed from this life, but there is much we can do for those who are still living. Certainly, we must grieve the loss of loved ones because grieving is a natural part of the healing that must take place. But after a reasonable period of grieving, we must get on with life. We don’t dare allow the sadness from yesterday to tarnish or diminish the potential happiness of today and tomorrow.
Life is a precious gift from God, and I believe God wants us to make the most of it no matter what happens. There can be no such thing as an “end-of-the-world” experience for us as long as we are still living. God’s love and the beauty of life are still there if we just reach out for them. If we are lonely, there must be other lonely people who would love to be friends with us. Just because we have lost a loved one is no reason to turn our backs on those who are still living. In the words of John Milton, “A mind is not to be changed by place or time, the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
