It’s worth taking a moment to consider where happiness
comes from. Is it from things like having someone love you, or
eating a fantastic meal, or having a great body, or relaxing on
the beach, or drinking a good cup of coffee?
No, actually. Those things all are phenomena that happen
outside of us, and they don’t cause the happiness. They might
be correlated with happiness — they happen, and then we are
happy at the same time — but it’s not a cause-and-effect
relationship. There’s another event that’s happening at the
same time.
That event is what happens in our brain between the
external event (a good cup of coffee) and our state of
happiness.
What is this event? It’s a process. Let’s take a close look:
1. We drink a cup of good coffee (or read a good book, eat
some delicious berries, have good sex, etc.).
2. We notice the coffee, pay attention to it. If we don’t pay
attention and are reading or otherwise occupied as we drink
the coffee, we don’t get the happiness from the coffee.
3. We appreciate the goodness in the coffee that we noticed.
It’s not just the noticing and paying attention — we have to
accept it for what it is, and appreciate the good things about
it.
4. This goodness we’ve noticed causes us to be happy about life.
We are now happy about the experience of living, about life
itself, because this experience is filled with goodness — even
if it’s just the goodness of a cup of coffee.
So that’s it: Noticing and appreciating the goodness in a cup of coffee
causes us to be happy about living. And the more we notice and
appreciate about our lives (and ourselves), the happier we are.
So does this mean that happiness is really about external
things, like the cup of coffee or the sex or the love from
someone else? No — it’s about the process that happens within.
And this process can happen no matter what’s going on outside.
It can happen even if there are no external stimuli — because
there are things inside of us that we can appreciate as well.
Let me emphasize that: All the raw material we need for
happiness is inside of us. The good things we can appreciate to
be happy — they are always with us, already there. And the
tools for turning these raw materials into happiness are within
us as well. We just need to develop them.
Action steps: Remember this truth: Noticing and
appreciating the goodness in anything causes us to be happy
about living. And the more we notice and appreciate about our
lives (and ourselves), the happier we are
