Happiness won’t happen to you, or me.

There are no blue-birds of happiness seeking nests.

It will not take us by surprise, arrive unannounced, and it won’t be ours because we read FaceBook memes or read anything inspirational or challenging anywhere, even the Bible.

And, no Podcast will do it – not even that.

Happiness has no victims. Happiness is an inside job, it is an internal state and it requires our willingness, our cooperation, and hard work.

Our happiness will be a direct result of what you and I do with our days.

Do we serve others?

Are we generous?

Do we accept and embrace and enjoy people who are different from us?

Do we look for beauty that is all around us and within everybody?

[If you think there is no beauty around you and there is no beauty in all people, well, you’ve already unearthed a major happiness blockage.]

Answering these questions with our lives will hold a few of many codes to unlock happiness and let it into our lives. And, this is a big one, our levels of happiness are never, not ever, up to others, no matter how much we may love or not love others. Happiness is not something another can provide for you at least for enduring lengths of time. Neither you nor I will be happier, or less happy, based on who or what we love or who or what we reject.

While I concede having money does make life just a little easier, our happiness levels are totally unrelated to money.

Some of the wealthiest people on the planet are clearly some of the most unhappy people.

Jesus of Nazareth said what comes out of people’s mouths reveals the state of people’s hearts or inner-beings.

Is there a millionaire or billionaire you’ve heard on TV with whom you’d want to share your daily life?

Happiness requires action and appears to play hard-to-get with those who persistently whine, “I just want to be happy.” It appears to play hard-to-get with complainers and those who seem entitled. Happiness and Laziness are not buddies. Laziness repels of Happiness. Happiness and Blamingness – I just made a new word – are not friends and, as far as I can tell, cannot co-exist in the same brain.

Finding a useful cause, a cause larger than oneself, and engaging in it with others who have the same or similar causes, and offering it zeal will quite often spark some thrill-for-life aka happiness.

While you and I are influenced even a tidbit by what others think of us (or what we think others think of us) we dead-bolt access to happinesses.

How and what we think and say of others is far more important than concerning ourselves with what “they” think and say of us.

In fact, it is a golden key.

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I’m loving the snow…… what about you?