happiness isn't a chase, it's a choice

Is there a crueler lesson in life - to chase happiness all the way through it - only to get to the end and realize it wasn't a chase at all, but a choice?

I don't think so. There can't be anything crueler.

Bronnie Ware spent years in palliative care. She cared for the dying. When writing about the top 5 regrets of the dying, one of them stuck out to me. Ware says:

"Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called comfort of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to themselves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

So much there, really. But the idea of staying "stuck in old patterns and habits" spoke to me.

I believe every one of us longs to "laugh properly and have silliness" in our lives again. But sadly, we think that laughter and silliness is something to be chased.

We think it is something I get tomorrow when I become this person life has convinced me I need to become. Or, it is something I get when I finally undo the things from yesterday life has convinced me I never should have been.

And that becomes the great happiness chase; the chase to undo and the chase to become. When, it seems, in the end - according to a lot of people like Ware who work with the dying - most people will wish they had just stopped chasing and had simpy been. They'll realize their goal every day shouldn't have been to undo or to become, but to simply be.

John Wooden, one of the greatest coaches of all time, once said, "Make each day your masterpiece. When you do that as the weeks and months and years....unfold behind you, you'll have the deepest self-satisfaction knowing your life has really meant something."

What keeps us from making a masterpiece today? A masterpiece fully of laughter and silliness. I think it's chasing instead of painting.

I think it's chasing a way to undo yesterday's tears or it's chasing down a way to prevent tears from coming along tomorrow. It's chasing instead of just sitting down today and painting laughter and smiles.

Happiness is this choice to end the chase. It's finding and doing life with the people who want to reach out and bring me back from those yesterdays I get stuck undoing, and they say let's smile together right here. It's finding and doing life with the people who want to reach out and bring me back from the tomorrow's I get lost dreaming in, and they say let's laugh a little about today.

Happiness isn't a chase, it's a choice. It's a choice that ends the pretending. It's a choice that prevents us from getting to the end of our lives and realizing in one dying moment that happiness wasn't pretend at all - it was a lie.

The beautiful thing is, if you're reading this, you're still alive. You don't have to wait to learn the truth, you can live that truth now. You can quit chasing today and start painting.

Each and every day, you can paint a masterpiece.