Your Story and Happiness
Your story is a powerful tool that you can use to increase your happiness.
Imagine a situation without a story. Imagine you are a man being visited by a woman from far away.
As the man, you have to power to create any story about the situation that you would like.
As you create the story, you would choose the details that you want to focus on. You would select the motivations of yourself and the woman. You would use certain powerful words to describe feelings and intuitions. You would focus on particular things and places and give them special meaning.
If you chose to tell a happy story, then you would get to be a happy guy.
If you chose to tell a sad story, then you would have to play the martyr.
The fact is, you are always creating the story. This inner narrative is always going on inside of you. You choose the content and meaning of your story. Your story is under your control, always; though we don’t always realize it.
We create the world we live in.
True, we do not have absolute control over our stories. There are certain facts we all must include in our stories (e.g., facts about the death of loved ones, the fact that we are breathing, the fact that rocks are hard), but we do have a large measure of control.
- We control our focus. If we choose to focus on flowers in our garden, then our life narrative is filled with flowers. If we do not watch the news on television, then the terrorism or earthquakes shown there does not exist for us. Terrorism and earthquakes would not exist in our internal world. True, we might be affected by terrorism one day, but then we probably would not call it terrorism, maybe we would call it simply gang violence.
- We independently give all facts meaning. Death, for instance, is an indisputable fact. However, whether death is good, bad or neutral is up to us. Death might mean many things, 1) the beginning of an eternity in hell (fear) or 2) the beginning of a life in paradise (happiness) or 3) vanishing into nothingness (neutrality). We get to choose the meaning of death for ourselves. We get to choose the meaning of every fact. When it rains, we get to choose if rain makes us sad, afraid, angry or happy.
On top of any one set of facts, you can superimpose nearly any story. The facts of your life situation do not dictate the story. No matter what facts are true in your life, you can create a happy story – or you can also create a sad story.
The myth is that the facts dictate the story. The myth is that the facts in your story can tell you whether you are happy or sad. This is very wrong and source of much unhappiness.
Choose your story carefully; your happiness depends on it.
