Seek Happiness, yes! Insist on character and integrity in yourself, yes! They go together, yes, yes!!

 Character, integrity and self-control: Starting to look kind of attractive, actually

Do more of what makes you happy.  It’s so easy for this to become a joke, an invitation to self-indulgence and hedonistic indifference.  I was struck this week at how American culture has shifted from character values that I grew up with.  A woman that I gifted with a $100 piece of exercise equipment complained to the Facebook group admin because the equipment didn’t fit under her bed.  Oh, waaah.  [I mistook the vendor and posted it wrong, then corrected it.  Hint: the originally-described equipment wouldn’t have fit under her bed, either.  And since when am I or anyone else responsible for something fitting under your bed?  Bring it back or otherwise deal with it.]  

How I was raised: if someone gives you something as a gift, the ONLY acceptable response is “Thank you.”  Then shut up, completely, permanently and forever.  Even if it’s the wrong size, the color is horrible and it doesn’t fit under your bed.  You don’t pretend to be grateful to the gifter’s face and then spew complaints to an authority-figure third party or the rest of the family or Facebook Friend cohort behind your gifter’s back. 

People used to think less of you for that kind of weasely behavior.  No more.  And maybe that’s a mistake.  Maybe we want to take our culture back in the direction of character.  Maybe we want to embrace actions of integrity – like talking TO people, not ABOUT people.  Maybe we want to deal with it a bit more and whine a lot less.

I know that after the Great Recession, in which I and millions of other Americans lost our shirts, with a weak, contingent-labor-loving employment paradigm, and about 1% of the previous level of economic and emotional safety, a lot of us are very, very frightened, to our cores.  Frightened of outcomes that would be unthinkable in any other advanced First World country, like living on the street.  And when people are scared, and know that they have no power to get back at their oppressors, they look for the nearest easy, weak target for their rage.  They find that easy, weak target in people less able than themselves – people who are financially struggling even more (and can’t fight back effectively), who are disabled, who are a minority color or religion or culture.  Or even just the nice people like me who are kind, generous and not as sly and political as they are.

What if we all just collectively cut it out?

Do more POSITIVE THINGS that make you happy.  Color with your kids, then put them to bed early and relax with a book for an hour.  Make nice with your neighbors who like you kids and will supervise their homework while you go to the gym, listen to Taylor Swift and improve your health.   Find the “free museum” day and take yourself off for a date with joy.  As the frustrations of the day build up, stop, take five deep, slow breaths and visualize tropical paradises or some of your life’s happy memories.  You have them, you know you do! 

Do this enough times and you won’t come home ready to spew lies and vitriol on your fellow-travelers through the travails of life.

Do more of what makes you genuinely happy.  Kicking the dog – or your fellow struggling humanity – will never do it.  My mother taught me to have courage and be kind a half-century before Disney turned it into a cliché.  Do more of that – and you will be happy.  

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Have Courage and Be Kind: What do you do if you didn't have a Golden Childhood?

 Have you seen the 2015 version of Cinderella?  Wonderful movie isn’t it?  The theme – Have courage and be kind, and all will be well – stunned me when I saw the movie in the theatre, because it is exactly what my mother taught me.

Think about it.  So much of what “happens” to us is really the result of a lack of courage on our part.  We stay in harmful situations way too long, allowing ourselves to be more deeply hurt, because we are afraid of the unknown that lies outside of the Known But Awful.  We stay in jobs.  We stay in relationships.  We let ourselves stay connected to toxic people of all types.  We stay in toxic places, that suck our souls dry.  Why?  Lack of courage.

We fall into mistakes because we lack the courage to thoroughly examine a proposition before we commit to it.  We tell ourselves that we are following our heart or our intuition, but what we’re really doing is telling the universe that we don’t matter, that looking out for ourselves with a minimal Due Diligence is wrong, because we don’t have the right to stop a slick sales pitch in its tracks and examine it very, very closely.  If we really mattered to ourselves, we wouldn’t care who got pissed off.  We would move toward what is good for us, move away from what isn’t healthy, and smile kindly while we say “No, thank you,” which is a complete sentence. 

Ella exhibited both kinds of courage.  And many kinds of kindness.

And most lovely of all, the movie reminds people like me, who work every day to uncover, clean out and repair the effects of childhood damage in beautiful adult souls, of the importance of what parents and teachers do.  If you are a parent or teacher, don’t ever believe that the hard work you do every day is thankless.  It isn’t.  Adult Ella was able to endure her harsh young adulthood of emotional abuse and neglect because her core belief in her own value and goodness was never breached.  That “golden childhood” of parental love, appreciation and delight inoculated her, for a long time, against the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune.  The wickedest adults could not make her bitter, angry and resentful, her soul shone in the darkest times, because she had a bone-deep belief in and memory of love.  Her youngest years protected her soul from shriveling under the heaviest hammer blows of adversity.  THAT soul is what the prince/king could not live without, and which gave him the courage to “become his own man.” 

That shining soul is the gift that those of us who’ve had a golden childhood carry with them, the armor that keeps them safe forever after.  The rest of us have to work harder – for years or decades, depending on the damage – to build that same deep, shining soul, that has courage and kindness as its north star.  When we do, we don’t have to battle against resentment, envy and uncertainty any more.  When we know, at the deepest level of our hearts, that we are lovable, then whether others do or don’t doesn’t determine our own behavior.  And then we become the hero/ine of our own glorious story, inspiring everyone around us.  We become the candle that lights up all the dark, scared candles around us. 

If you wonder if you’ll ever have Ella’s kindness and courage, know that there are healers like me in the world, who have the skills and the determination to help you become a person who can light candles all around you, a person with a genuine, rock-solid certainty of their own value, and the deepest humility about themselves.  You can do it.  We all can.  For those of us without a golden childhood, it can be a long, hard trek, but the mountaintop is reachable.  We really can all be Ella.  Blessed be.