Happiness is a choice. It is based upon our mood, our point of view, our opinion of the facts of our life, not upon the facts of our life themselves.

A conversation I had recently:

Why can't we just be happy?

It's not meaningful if we don't have to choose being happy.

Well, can't we just move from happiness to more happiness?

Yes, of course. That's what we're all heading toward. But we learn the way of that by moving from despair to feeling good. That's where we build the muscle.

How do you know we're not supposed to be unhappy?

Said the ego.

Huh?

We look at the world through the eyes of the ego, or through the eyes of nature.

And you're saying that being depressed is looking through the eyes of ego.

It's not natural to be depressed. Imagine the headline: 

Plague of Depression Sweeps Tulips of Holland, and there are pictures of vast fields of tulips dying because there's just no reason to go on. "Plant psychiatrist Alfred E. Newman says crop dusting with Lexapro the only hope." Absurd, right?

To move from despair to happiness always requires a choice, at some point: a choice to get up from the chair, to go to the store, to return a call, to write an email, to take a walk. If we cannot choose to be happy in a moment, at least we can choose to move, because that's what happiness looks like: it's on the move. When we find ourselves feeling better, on our way out of the field of despair, of depression, we will always be able to track back and see where the choice was made.

And these choices never are easy. We're working against inertia. But it's the fact they are not easy that makes them important, that builds the muscle that allows us to take it even further. To move in the direction of joy.

Today I will pick up the thousand pound phone and make that call. I will go to my cactus-keyed computer and write that email. I will insist on smiling one smile that is connected to my eyes, to my heart, to my gut and to another person.