“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” – Omar Khayyam

A therapist asked me some years ago what I wanted out of my life. I didn’t blink. “I want to be happy,” I said.

I decided to pursue happiness in my life and work on being happy, or happier, within reason, and without losing perspective.

I’m not Mr. Rogers; I appreciate my skepticism, independence, and individuality. I don’t need to be loved by or agreed with by everyone, and I don’t care to be around people who are happy every minute of every day.

They make me nervous. In the life of every human, there will always be something to be low amount. The question is how we deal with it. I wasn’t doing well for much of my life.

A decade later, I find myself very much happier, if not always comfortable, and not always happy; I am sometimes angry and depressed. That’s who I am.

I think any human being who is happy all the time or who feels that possible is headed for disappointment. I do not have the gift of faking things. My mood is on the surface, in my life, in my writing.

I knew this would not be easy and it wasn’t.

It’s like thinking going on a diet will magically solve your weight or health problems. That also takes a lot of thought, work, and willingness to change.

The Dalai Lama says the purpose of our lives is to be happy, but respectfully, I disagree with the great man. The purpose of my life is to love, to create, do some good,  to find happiness, peace, and meaning.

It’s not one thing for me. The key to being happy, wrote one prophet, is knowing you have the power to choose what to accept and what to let go of.

Thomas Merton wrote that happiness is not intensity but balance, order rhythm, and harmony.

That is a fair and accurate description in my experience.

It is both realistic and achievable. But like everything else worth doing, it isn’t easy. Happiness is a direction, a goal, a path, not a burst of lightning or a particular place.

In my life, I find that there have been no instant, easy resolutions to getting what is most important to me.

I read once that happiness and suffering are temporary, not material; they are human creations that exist only within the mind and often have no real connection to our lives outside of ourselves.

I’ve written many times that fear is not a real thing but geography, a space to cross. It only really exists in our minds. I’ve found that the same is true of happiness and suffering for me. Fear nearly killed me and did ruin my life, I very rarely feel it any longer.

When we respond to the problems and challenges of life with a positive and peaceful mind, say the spiritual gurus, then they can suddenly seem to melt away into nothing. They come and go; they are not permanent. I have found that to be true.

We can, if we choose – and I sometimes do choose – to see my troubles and sorrows as a challenge, an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth. I use them. That turns them from trauma to truth and learning.

Every trouble I have makes me a better human being because it offers me the chance to respond in a healthy and meaningful way.

Everything that happens to me – good or bad -can be a chance to grow and learn. That choice is up to me.

The most important thing I’ve learned is to let go. That was the first chapter and the hardest one. Once I learned to do it, the world brightened and opened up to me.

I realized that if I could let go of the things that make me unhappy, it would be so much easier to be happy. There would be so much more room for happiness.

We all have limited space in our heads, and there is no hard drive for additional storage. The more fear and anger, the less happiness. I didn’t need to be Sigmund Freud to figure that out.

So I decided to focus on what I feared, hated, or resented. I would make these things work for me, I would not wallow or get stuck in them. Grievance accomplishes nothing and brings with it misery.

That meant learning to let go of the things that troubled, upset, obsessed, or angered me the most. That was a very new way to look at them. It didn’t matter if I was right or wrong, my final revenge was to live my life as I wished to live it

That was enough.

I didn’t really expect it to work; it seemed such a tall order. But to a surprising extent, thanks to hard work:  therapy, meditation, contemplation, and persistence, it did work.

Some examples:

I was furious at my parents for most of my life, who caused my sister and me almost unbearable pain and fear. I could not forgive them and went over my grievances against them repeatedly. So did she.

I spoke of them often and my resentment ran amuck in my consciousness. I saw just how deep this pain and anger was in my meditation.

That is when I was able to step back, and instead of blaming them for my troubles, I worked at saying goodbye, letting go, and of course, forgiving them.

They did the best that they could do. They were long dead, I needed to leave them in peace and find some for myself.

A few years ago, while in therapy, I resolved to let go of my anger, to let go and move on. That was an enormous boost to my idea of being happy. It took me several months – balance, harmony, rhythm.

But I was able to do it.

Every time I had a bad, fearful or angry thought, I switched to a better one, a happier one, a small act of great kindness, a hug from a friend, a walk with a dog, a beautiful photo,  decision to forgive was an opportunity for something better.

I rarely think of my parents in that bitter way now, if at all. I have moved on. Grievance, like hate, does not solve problems. It enables them.

I have better things to do than read nasty messages and wash dishes.

Writing on the Internet as I do, I am often the recipient of messages from angry and broken people who have become adept at cruelty and pain.

Social media is the perfect outlet for the disturbed; there are no boundaries or penalties for cruelty.

Until the World Wide Web, troubled people had no way to express their anger and suffering, now they can choose from billions of targets all over the world. It’s free and there are no consequences.

It is their work, not mine; they can become quite skilled at it. And they were often able to draw me into it because they tapped into the anger and resentment inside me. We damaged people can sniff one another from a mile – or a digital cable – away.

I realized that I was drawing them like bees to honey. What I put out was coming back to me. Time to put out something better.

That was a fight within me that I simply could not afford to lose. And I didn’t.

For a long time, I struggled to get past these messages, to either ignore them or find a way to respond. The problem was that they hurt me, something I was reluctant to admit. That made them difficult to dismiss.

But I realized the healthy response was not a response. No other response could work or was good for me.

Sometimes, I woke up thinking of these very personal and sometimes threatening messages and often responded in kind.

I didn’t like the anger and cruelty that swelled up in me, it was old and deep. I wasn’t hurting them, only me.

But by now, and over time, I was working to keep my life in balance, meditation and solitude brought me harmony, Maria and the farm, and my photos and blog brought me balance. So did the animals here.

Mostly the messages have stopped coming, and I have ceased responding to them or being bothered by them. I don’t even remember them.

Something they sensed in me was gone; they had no reason to stay.

When I see one today, I delete or ignore it, and move on to the things that matter to me: balance, harmony, and rhythm. Pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice.

I made sure to have positive people around me resolved and to be doing positive things – every single day. I did and do some good every day.

That’s how I wake up now – asking myself what good I can do today? That is the proper rhythm of my life. That is what makes me happy.

And my consciousness is filling up with good things, no matter how many bad things are filling up their news.

Then, I suppose I should mention politics, a poison for so many people when it comes to happiness. I knew it could be poison for me.

No matter what side you are on, if you hate the other side and bring argument and resentment into your life, you will drive happiness and peacefulness out of your life. It can be no different than opioid pills.

Once you take one, you can be hooked.

It was up to me to manage this without sticking my head in the sand.

I resolved from 2016 on that it will not happen to me, this will not dominate me or take me over,  and it hasn’t. I spent no time in my life arguing with strangers on Facebook or social media.

I check in on politics from time to time and write about it occasionally, but it will not infect my consciousness, take me over, or become the daily rhythm in my life.

That is just another kind of poison.

Today, I am happy to report that I am content, if not always comfortable. I get depressed from time to time, I always have and always will. There is no magic pill for happiness.

I worked hard at it and found once again, that being hard and committed is the only true way to take on the challenges of life.

Life offers the promise of happiness, but it also offers the reality of hardship and disappointment, and tragedy. I never expect my life to be only one or the other.

I will say this. I am happier than I ever was or imagined. I have more work to do; of course, I will always have more work to do. I don’t want to be someone else, I want to be a better and more peaceful me.

As I grow older, I am finding that it is never too late to learn. I have been acquiring the experience, lessons, and challenges of life that keep me changing and edging closer and closer to happiness all the time.

I don’t know how far I can take it or how far I want to.

I have never been happier in all of my life, and maybe I am approaching that point in life where I can be satisfied with myself and stop searching for something better.

That would make me very happy.