The World *Must* Make Me Happy

I found a link to a Three Minute Therapy website today and it was very interesting to me. It tells how our thinking and expectations make us unhappy, not the things that happen to us. What if you were in an airplane, someone gave you a parachute and shoved you out. If you were told before hand that the plane was going to crash, your expectations would make you terrified. If instead, you had paid a lot of money to go sky diving then you would be perfectly happy, if not still terrified, with the situation. So it’s not the situation that makes us unhappy, it’s our expectations.

This may sound unfeeling but I am learning to simply not care about most things that happen to me in life. I don’t think this is unfeeling. In fact I am choosing to feel happy instead of miserable in spite of things around me that are out of my control. I’m not implying in any way that I have actually achieved this blissful state but I am much closer than I used to be. I about lost my mind the other day in a Walmart checkout line that had me waiting for, I think, 16 hours. Luckily the checker was sympathetic and we pretended that the wait was the fault of the customers ahead of me so I was able to recover in a reasonable time. I would prefer to always get in the fastest line for checkout but if I don’t then life will go on. I did learn one thing though. Don’t unload your groceries until it is your turn. That way you can switch lanes when you see that the checker is completely incompetent and in fact moves even slower now that you are in her lane because she enjoys the sound of your screaming baby and watching your 6 and 8 year olds race around the cart trying to cause and escape physical harm. I think that along with the porn in the checkout lanes and the candy that launches children into hysterics, they should have large displays of class ware. It would make our shopping excursions just that much more thrilling and suspenseful as to whether we all get out of the store alive.

Oh ya, back to the website. I really would prefer that all the women on my tennis league don’t hate my guts because I accidentally stood them up not once but twice, but my life will go on if they do. Even when we drive by one of them on the way to the gym and she turns her head and pretends she doesn’t see us waving because the hatred is so severe. I may lose a couple minutes sleep over it but ultimately this will not give me ulcers. Insanely slow checkout lanes might but this will not.