Choosing The Lighter Path

Optimism as a choice, and not just as in inherent characteristic, is a subject that fascinates me.

While I've always wanted to be a "glass half full" kinda gal, I have to say that I tend toward the "half empty" explanation on pretty much everything if I'm being honest about it.  Always have.

No idea if this is a genetic predisposition or a trick of the mind in terms of mental habit, but here we are.

Gretchen Rubin, of The Happiness Project, has an interview with Heather King which I found really fascinating in a number of places.  To wit:

Happiness to me is a mood, and a mood that is largely dependent on outside circumstances: whether I have money in the bank, whether the sun is shining, whether I’m healthy. Any way of life where I’m dependent on what happens outside of me, I’m sunk.

What I’m after is joy, and joy has pain—our pain and the sorrow of the whole world—in the middle of it. Joy, unlike happiness, becomes a state that you may experience only in fleeting stabs, but nonetheless abides.

She goes on to anchor this philosophy through Mother Theresa's life and works.  While it is admirable to strive to look at the world through the likes of Mother Theresa's eyes, I'm not quite certain how practical that might be for all of us on a day to day basis.

But then the interview hits a huge home run for me with this:

What happens is that you spiritually mature and you stop having expectations. You stop having expectations and that doesn’t make for bland mediocrity, as you’d feared: it opens the window to a richer, fuller, more joy-filled life than you ever would have thought possible. Again, you’re in contact with reality. You’re better able to accept life the way it is, not the way you wish it would be. Instead of feeling that nothing is ever enough, you’re grateful for the tiniest thing: a leaf, a basket of figs, a handshake.

We get back to living consciously in the moment, and gratitude for what we have that is right in front of us all along rather than wishing our lives away.

Dorothy's ruby slippers writ personal, right?

There really is no place like home, once you see the world through that lens.

Go read the entire interview and see what you think.  The choices we all make, every day, lead us toward a path that is more light than dark, or vice versa.  My goal is to choose the lighter path, more often than not, and thus choose more happiness where I can consciously do so.

(Photo via MarceRodz.  Love this shot -- just perfect.  Reminds me of the cave analogy in Plato's Republic, of trying  to see past the shadows cast on the wall toward the reality outside the cave of our own making.)