No Impediments Erected

We must not build and position impediments on the road in front of us, the road to recovery and happiness. Probably nobody knows more about being happy and how to achieve this dispositional outlook than the sage Dennis Prager I was listening to his happiness hour radio show yesterday as I drove around. Prager advises that the only way to be happy is to display, live, be and believe that one can be happy and that such mental state is possible, if one maintains a positive attitude, no matter what occurs each day. Prager allowed that we are often dissatisfied with where we are at in life. Our dissatisfaction can be negative, because we feel wretched that our life has no direction. Our dissatisfaction may be the positive frustration of the gifted researcher not yet able to discover the medicine that will cure Type II diabetes. Prager commands the listener to differentiate between being dissatisfied (That is fine because our dissatisfaction impels us to try harder, to grow and achieve.) and being unhappy. He warns that we should be happy whether or not we are dissatisfied or not, and we should be happy regardless of whether we are experiencing good fortune or bad fortune at the moment. He also spoke of his increasing impatience with and intolerance towards unhappy people as he has grown older. He is totally right about this. Living each day with a positive attitude becomes a good habit and a way of life. If a quarterback can be retrained to throw the ball faster and smoother, then each person can be trained by parents, teachers and the pastor to think happy thoughts, feel happy feelings, and live as a happy person. Once a youth is offered this training and knows the techniques for learning to be happy--plus instructed in how to self-realize, remaining unhappy is her fault for failing to train herself to be upbeat while working everyday for the rest of her life to keep her emotional batteries charged. The failure to individuate adds an intangible reason to be depressed: if one individuates not, then the self does not respect the self, and that leads to self-loathing and unhappiness. Granted there are very depressed people just crippled by their genetic, emotional disability, but Prager's system for learning to be happy would offer them more relief in most cases than taking drugs.His method would alleviate their suffering.