In my post Look What’s In Your Hand, I encourage the reader to acknowledge the simple fact of having made it through every day right up to the present. That is not a simple feat. Nor is it one that deserves to be shrugged off and taken for granted. It is not a throw-away piece of knowledge. It is a simple exercise to show that we miss truths we’re not looking for.

One way to think of life is as a daily search for clues revealing how we should feel about things. But life rigged the search. It will reveal the evidence you’re looking for. It will confirm your biases, whether good or bad. What you look for determines what you see. Optimists don’t need rose colored glasses. They are looking for things to feel good about, and they see them. Pessimists look for evidence to confirm their frustrations, disappointments, and skepticism, and they find the evidence. Problems are incredibly easy to spot. A child can do it.

A wiser man than I once said, ”You don’t see the world the way it is, you see it the way you are.”

Unknown…

To see a different world requires a different you. 

Do not despair, this is not an impossibility. However, seeing the good in the world around you is an acquired skill. It takes a commitment to look for the good and to recognize it when you see it. It doesn’t take any particular skill or talent to see all the problems in the world. Mastering the ability to see the good all around you is one of the most worthwhile pursuits of life. It is indispensable to a good life because a prerequisite for having one is the ability to see what is good about it. 

No one who is habitually focused on the problems and deficits of their circumstances, or of the world in general, is living a good life, no matter how much money they make, what car they drive, or any other external factor.

Every person chooses whether to be happy or not.  The decision is made alongside the determination to look for and see the good, or not. Some make the choice on the front-end and evaluate their circumstances based on that choice. They know that what you look for will determine what you see. For these, even when bad things happen, they haven’t neglected to also spot the good, the recognition of which acts as a defensive buffer for their mind and emotions. 

Others make the happiness choice on the back end, allowing circumstances to dictate the choice for whether they will be happy or not. And people waiting for circumstances to be exactly as they want them to be before they can be happy never are.