Happiness Is...

I just walked two miles on the treadmill in 28 minutes! Making progress makes me happy.

As I said I would here, I read again What Happy People Know by Dan Baker. The book made a lot more sense to me the second time through because I was no longer looking for the secret to happiness. There is no magic formula, but there are things that people can learn to do.

Happy people know that life has ups and downs. They know the hard times won't last, or as Oprah says, trouble don't last always. People who are happy do not allow fear to derail their lives. They let go of the stories of the past to live in the present. Happy people talk to themselves in a positive way even when, especially when, they're having a hard time. People who are happy aren't always happy, and they give themselves a break when life isn't going exactly the way they want it to or thought it would.

On page 94 Baker writes about the lesson he learned from an 86-year-old woman whose positive attitude transcended what many would see as reasons for her to be unhappy. "From that day on, I realized that there was something happy people know that unhappy people don't: No matter what happens in life, there's always something left to love, and the love that remains is always stronger than anything that goes against it." I starred that page so I could find it again easily.

When I finished Baker's book this week, the memory of a picture book I had as a young child came to mind. I remember reading it with an older cousin who would help me with the words I didn't know. Yesterday I found the six-inch square, brightly colored book on the shelf with the poetry books. In Happiness Is A Warm Puppy, Charles Schulz identifies and illustrates simple joys of childhood with the Peanuts characters. It's an adorable book and lists many of the things that children love, from jumping in a pile of leaves to sleeping in your own bed. I realize all these years later that many of the things mentioned in the book still make me happy.

Happy people know how to appreciate the simple things in life.