Happy Valentines Day! These days I have my nose in Lester Levenson's book, "Happiness is Free...and it's easier than you think!" You may be thinking...oh yeah....just another one of those mamby pamby self help books. Perhaps, but none the less it is ranking up there as one of my favorites. Why? One word, Simple. That's right, the book is simple.
Basically the author, Lester lead a life of what most of us would classify as normal. He graduated from college in 1931 and went on with a successful career as an engineer for twenty-some years dabbling in various other business along the way. By 1952 he had been through constant illnesses...enlarged liver, kidney stones, spleen trouble, hyper acidity, ulcers and 10 years of migraine headaches. It was all topped off with a second coronary thrombosis and was told he might die anyday. So he went home and realized that all the knowledge he had accumulated over the forty-two years was of no avail. He had reached the end of the line without real happiness and without health and now he wanted it more then ever.
So he began asking himself what he really wanted out of life, now that his days were numbered. His answer was happiness. To dig a little deeper, he recalled the moments in his life that he had felt the happiest. What he discovered was, it was when he was LOVING that he was the happiest. That happiness equated to HIS capacity to LOVE rather than TO BEING loved.
Sweet...simple...and true. It does feel better to LOVE than to BE LOVED.
On this day of love, perhaps take a minute or two and recall a time in your life when you were in crazy love. Pull up and dissect high moments of loving in your life. Do you too get an inkling of a feeling that it was when you were loving someone that you had the highest feelings of love and happy bliss? What an appropriate and good exercise on Valentines Day.
My take away from all this is...what can I do today for the ones I love? We all have heard it is better to give than to receive. Lester is right on!
Five Simple Rules for Happiness
1. Free your heart from hatred
2. Free your mind from worries
3. Live Simply
4. Give More
5. Expect Less
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