Happiness [antikvár]

1.1The three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.Joseph Addison (1672-1719), English essayist, poetand politicianCan you really teach yourself how to be happy? The answer is emphatically 'yes'.You can learn how to make yourself warm and how to make yourself cold. You can learn how to make yourself hungry and how to make yourself full. You can learn all manner of things. Why should happiness be any different?In essence, it isn't. Philosophers have long said it. Scientists have proven it. But, like so many things that have to be learned, it requires effort.It will help if you treat being happy as a challenge, just hke learning a foreign language, mastering the lotus position or climbing a mountain. It calls for single-mindedness and, quite often, the setting aside of other less important goals. To be happy you have to make happiness your priority. This is a notion that surprises many people. They think happiness should come as easily as breathing or drinking. But it doesn't. So now I have to ask you: Do you really want to be happy?The answer would seem obvious. And the fact that you're reading this book only underlines what would appear to be common sense. Surely, everybody wants to be happy!Well, yes, but the problem is that when it comes to making a choice between happiness and something else, people so often choose the sometWng else. When it comes down to it, many people would choose, for example, wealth or power or 'success' over happiness. That's not to say, of course, that you can't be rich, powerful, 'successful' and happy. But there will come occasions when you're faced with a choice: happiness or wealth; happiness or power; happiness or revenge. Which will you choose then?In a film called City Slickers an old cowboy played by the late Jack Palance holds up a gloved finger and tells the impressionable tenderfoot Billy Crystal that the secret of happiness is just one thing. Just one. Naturally, Billy wants to know what the one thing is. Jack gives a mysterious little smile and tells him: 'That's what you've got to figure out'.