A friend sent me an interview with the Dalai Lama today and I was struck, as always, by his positive yet down-to-earth attitude to life and the world in general. The theme of the interview was Happiness (something we are rather dismissive of in our culture, preferring Fulfilment or Satisfaction because we believe Happiness is transient and, even, not a worthwhile goal.
One sentence stood out in particular - The journalist interviewing the Dalai Lama summed up his attitude as: You make your way to happiness not by fretting about it or trafficking in New Age affirmations, but simply by finding the cause of your suffering, and then attending to it, as any doctor (of mind or body) might do.
Of course, as a person of action I would like this. It justifies my belief that we can bring about huge changes in both our circumstances and our attitudes if we choose. Clearly we won't always choose Happiness. We may want or need to be sad, to mourn, to face a hardship...there is nothing wrong with choosing a difficult path and facing our fears or with having a natural reaction when something bad happens.
But most of the time we are not faced with huge hardship or great sadness. We just don't choose Happiness because we don't think we can. We wait for it to hit us between the eyes and often miss it because we aren't consciously seeking it.
This might seem a rather irrelevant tangent in a blog about success but it isn't if you define success in a broader way. And if Happiness can come about through a shift of mindset rather than requiring a perfect set of circumstances to align and coincide with a day where we also got out of the bed on the right side, then that means success is closer to all of us than we might think.
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