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We Can Always Choose, but Never Control, Our Happiness

<Acceptance>

Most of us know that happiness goes beyond a feeling—that happiness is a choice. However, sometimes we just don’t feel good despite wanting to make the choice to be happy. Sometimes we wake up feeling depressed or anxious, and the knowledge that happiness is a choice can make us feel even more depressed because we feel that we have failed in some way. We feel even more frustrated at our inability to make the choice to be happy.

But here is what is important to understand—making a choice is not as the same as having control. One of the main reasons we feel frustrated at not being able to be happy is because we think our happiness is something we can control.

The problem with trying to control our lives and how we feel is that we will rarely or never succeed, because we cannot control what happens to us, and to a great extent, we cannot control how we feel. Our emotions are tied to good news and bad news, likes and dislikes, love and pain. To say that we shouldn’t feel a certain way is to deny our humanity. Every emotion we feel is part of being human. To be human with grace, we need to accept that we are full of thoughts, ideas, and emotions that make us capable of extreme greatness as well as incredible sorrow.

Life takes us where it wants to take us, and the best thing we can do for ourselves is to make the choice to influence, to steer, to drive it—but we can only do that if we’re not fighting against our own thoughts and our emotions.

When people talk about the secret of happiness, they’re not talking about how we can constantly feel pleasure and elation, but how we can be in a state of contentment and peace. To be at peace is to look all the bad things fully in the face and say, “I’m not going to fight you.”

When we feel we need to protect ourselves, our instincts are always to resist. We feel that resisting means we are not giving up. But it’s in fact the opposite—resisting what we feel makes it even harder to be happy, because we are constantly feeling guilty for feeling bad. In a way, the unwillingness to accept how we feel means we are rejecting ourselves over and over again, making it very hard for us to see the value of our lives.

This is where all of us have to know that accepting our own negativity, sadness, or depression is not giving up. Giving acceptance to ourselves is giving kindness. It’s giving understanding. It’s not saying, “You ruined your own life because you can’t feel happy.”

Acceptance is saying, “It’s okay, breath by breath, you can try again tomorrow.”

All of us have experienced moments of deep sadness and negativity; we have days where we feel down without any real reason why. If we can be kind to ourselves during these moments instead of being frustrated at ourselves, it’s already a step forward.

What’s so crucial for us to understand is that moving forward in life isn’t about never taking steps backwards. Sometimes we move three steps forward and five steps back. It can be incredibly frustrating because we feel like we’ve tried so hard to climb up, only to slide back down again. But that’s not failing, that’s simply living.

We understand that no one is perfect, so why are we so hard on ourselves during the times when we are not perfect?

So often, we think that we must control our emotions. We must control our lives. But control is only an illusion—that’s why our efforts to control almost always backfire and we end up feeling worse. In life, we cannot control how we feel or how things happen, but we have absolute power over the way we respond to them.

Choosing happiness is not about controlling our emotions—it’s not suddenly going from feeling sad to feeling happy the next moment. When we choose happiness, it means we understand that the value of our lives is never defined by how we feel at that moment.

We don’t look at people who are unhappy and think that their lives are worth less. Don’t just practice kindness toward others, and don’t learn to only love others. When we practice accepting the entirety of what makes us…us—the good times and the not-so-good times—it means we are practicing loving kindness toward ourselves.