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In Pursuit of Happiness -- Marie Umali (March 06) Speech 6 |
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Good
evening fellow Toastmasters and honored guests. There is nothing I love more than reading and I am
passionate about a
particular section of the bookstore, self-help and personal improvement. Inside those books were the answers to all of my problems.
I see the faces of Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura Schlesinger smiling at me,
calling me to share in their wisdom. There’s
John Gray telling me that I’m really from the planet Venus, and not from
Earth. But on one particular day, I
was on the hunt for a book on happiness. I
found one and brought it to the cashier. He
glanced at the title, “Eight Minutes to Happiness” and as he was giving me
my change back, he said “You should keep your receipt.”, meaning of course
that it was probably going to take more than 8 minutes to find happiness. In
preparing for this speech, I took a very unscientific poll. I asked several friends, co-workers, and family members if
they were happy. When were they
happiest? What things or situations
made them happy? Many seemed caught
off guard with the questions – as if I had just given them a pop quiz they
hadn’t quite prepared for. After
a few minutes of thinking about the questions, I got the following answers:
What
do I mean by “happy”? Well, for
those who like definitions, the dictionary says that happiness is the “state
of well-being, characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense
joy.” Another definition is: “an agreeable feeling, or condition of the soul
arising from good fortune or a favorable
happening of any kind. The state of
being happy; contentment; joyful satisfaction; felicity; blessedness.” But
as my mother pointed out, happiness is such a general word. Why not call it the feeling of joy, of peace, of satisfaction
after a job well done, of knowing that we’ve done our best, of feeling like we
have enough? But, for me, I’ve
only found these in “moments”; in pockets of events in my life. I didn’t feel happy all the time and I think my
dissatisfaction stems from my wanting to feel happy all the time, before I can
confidently say to the world, “Yes, I’m happy!” I didn’t know the answer.
I
hadn’t found the answer. In the
middle of my life, I was still pursuing happiness. But
I was willing to listen and learn from those who claim to have found it. From Dr. Seuss to the Dalai Lama, from philosophers to kings, they all
have their own take on this subject and this is what they’ve said. Happiness
can be found through acts of service and by finding your purpose. The Dalai Lama teaches that it is through compassion that we can be truly
be happy. Learn to live in a constant state of gratitude and stay in
the present moment. Happiness, they
say, is a decision and an attitude. Happiness
is intent, as when someone looks in the mirror and says “I’m going to be
happy today and I’m going to try to not make anyone else unhappy.” Happiness lies within us.
It
isn’t something we chase or find and how many of us have chased dreams,
fortunes, addictions, religions, and other people, all in the hope of fulfilling
our lives. These wise men and women say that it’s something that we
have to create. Lastly, that happiness is a choice.
Happiness is a choice. This
was obvious to me than when I watched my father go through his battle with colon
cancer and I watched him every single day go to Cedars Sinai Hospital for his
chemotherapy treatments. The
nurses loved him! He would crack
jokes, make them laugh. He was
flirtatious, optimistic, never gloomy or melancholy. He wasn’t fake by any means.
There
were days when he’d say, “Ooooh, not so good”, touching his stomach…but
most of the time, he was upbeat. I’d sometimes catch my father dancing and
exercising to his favorite songs. You would never suspect that he was ill if not
for the bandage around his left arm that held a needle permanently in place for
his chemo. Happiness is a choice.
The writer, Dennis Prager, says that we are afflicted with what he calls
the “Missing Tile Syndrome” According to him, one of the ways we ruin our happiness is to look at a
beautiful scene and fixate on whatever is flawed or missing, no matter how
small. Imagine looking at a tiled
ceiling from which one tile is missing and you’ll most likely focus on that
missing tile. The more beautiful
the ceiling, the more you will concentrate on the missing tile and let it affect
your enjoyment of it. Now when it
comes to ceilings or anything else in the physical world, wanting things to
exist in its complete form is desirable or even necessary. Ceilings, he says, can be perfect, but life cannot.
In life, there will always be tiles missing. We can always imagine a more perfect life, or we can choose to focus on
real or perceived flaws to diminish our happiness. He said in order to deal with the Missing Tile syndrome, we have to
determine if what’s missing is central to
our happiness or if it is just another insatiable longing. The
solution, he says, is to Get It, Forget It, or Replace It with another tile.
As
I was trying to summarize my points, I thought, there has to be something more I
can say, something more on this subject that I can share with you, and in that
one instant, in a flash of a moment, I realized, well maybe that was my problem.
I was always looking for something more, like one more book to tell me
“what happy people know”. I was trying to hold on to that euphoria.
But trying to sustain the feeling of happiness endlessly is impossible.
At some point, that experience is bound to pass, and the moment
will be gone. The novelist, Albert
Camus said that “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what
happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of
life.” After all of my searching,
I try to keep in mind just one bit of wisdom, which is that “Happiness is
really nothing more than good health … and a bad memory.” Madame Toastmaster… copyright
2006 Marie Umali |