Happiness is all in your mind.

 I used to think that happiness was just a throwaway term, having to do with how much you like some thing. The more you like stuff, the more rich give you happiness, and the more stuff you have than the happier you must be. Especially if it’s expensive stuff and most people don’t have that kind of stuff. Yeah that’s a lot of stuff for a first paragraph.

But lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’ve been writing a lot about a book, mind hacking happiness, by Sean Webb.  It turned a lot of things around in my brain and the way I look at stuff. I was so agitated at the end of the day when my energy would be soft, that I thought that was just the end of it, and my day would just drain off and my happiness would be less and less.

One thing I should mention is that my son was diagnosed with autism last year. I thought that with his new diagnosis, he would not exactly go floating into second grade. Especially when he refused to do camp over the summer as he has every year past. A big transition that makes him very unhappy.

He’s usually a happy kid, but there are just times when he is so angry that he pulls his fist up and he growls, and before I go on too much about this because that’s a whole topic and itself, I will just explain to you that things that you might think are fun like camp, terrify him and make him angry. So even from the time that you were little, you had the choice to be happy about a particular thing, camp in this case, or you can just look at it like it’s the worst thing in the world. and if we make you do it, it’s taking an attack on you. His resistance to things makes it so difficult, but then if I look at it a different way, it’s my understanding of not having to live in his world that is making him angry.

Let me give you another example. On my way here to the gym, in the dark save for a few street lights down the main strip that I drive, I have my high beams on in my SUV when I drive on the windy road to it.  I have my highbeams on to avoid hitting deer, raccoons, fox, any stray critter In my path, and today I left it on when I was driving down Valley Road. I had forgotten that I left it on, until some body was coming towards me and High beamed me and kept them on.

They were pretty glarey in my eyes, and my glasses weren’t helping to deflect the glare, and I thought to myself there was a time when I probably would’ve cursed this a*****e shining his lights at me. I turned them off quickly and then realized that they were passing me and still had them on.

The situation didn’t affect me emotionally at all I kind of looked at it from above and saw it for what it was. It was just two people driving down the same road in opposite directions using light as communication. One approaches the other and forgets the lights are on, and the other one flash is back. Keeping it on made me think that they were having the same need as me. To warn other creatures that we are on a mission on the road so early in the morning. Move out of the way.

It made me happy to realize that I looked at it from such a big perspective when I would just emotionally react to everything in my world. We have a choice to be happy or not. It’s all in your mind.

I have a choice to scream back at my son when he screaming and rage at me for some thing that I could not realize was a life-changing event for him. Pretty much now he wants to know that he matters in the world and that his opinion counts and he can make his own choices. When those choices don’t make any sense to me, I can’t deny that there is some sort of seven year old logic that went into making his choices, so I want to ask him more about why he is so angry. I am going to ask him why a little bit more and have some patience if he does not answer me the first try. He probably doesn’t know why he isn’t happy.

Here’s another example. And this is the last because I really have to go into the gym in my rearview mirror behind me. It seems like second graders are getting a lot of homework compared with first grade. I’m not a helicopter mom but I’d like to be involved in helping my son get his homework done whatever he needs. If I don’t understand something I’m sure there’s a YouTube video out there, and we have my mom, his Grandma, to help.  If his dad were around more at the time when it needs to be done, I am sure he would be on task to pitch in, especially in science where he excels. I don’t want anyone to think that it’s just myself and my mom in this. So this is a pretty lucky kid with three adults in his immediate life that want to help him get his homework done.

There is one new piece of homework which is a book log. It is required that they read one book a day. It’s not much to ask for a kid to read one book a day. But to get Sean‘s face out of his iPad is tough, at 7 o’clock when it is supposed to be shut down for the night. No media after 7 PM. Even if we give him a warning, it doesn’t help because that’s his first happiness.

So I am reading this book to him that he brought home from the media center, media is his special on Wednesdays, so I thought it would be a great opportunity for him to read the book he chose. It was 24 pages. Really not a big read or much to ask.

He would only read if I read opposite pages with him, and then I made the mistake of reading two and switching him to the other side.  He flipped out. Definitely wasn’t happy reading this book anymore. Poo on me for doing that.

He proceeded to say that he was not going to write the book in his log because he did not like that book.  It made him happy when we he was reading it with me, but I think the fact that I switched pages did not help the matter. All I wanted to do was to finish up with my signature on the book log, but he was refusing to make this book count on his log.

Now I realize how much of his happiness is going to depend on all of us understanding how to deal with a kid with autism is hardwired. We need to calm down to his world more to make him happy and the rest of us happy. It’s all in your mind, what do you have autism, whether you have MS, A chronic illness that causes you to have anxiety because the world is attacking you.

Happiness is a frame of mind. Step back and see the world for what it is, whether it’s a person hi beaming you because you left your highbeams on, Or even if you’re Sam I am. He didn’t like green eggs and ham, but then He realized they made him happy after all. Now go be happy.