Choosing a life: Choosing Happiness

Choosing A Life

My old college chum, Adam Phillips, has written his seventeenth book on psychoanalysis: “Missing Out”. It’s got a compelling premise – he writes about how the life we haven’t lived can haunt us and undermine the way we feel about the life we have.

It’s an interesting starting point, suggesting that we torture ourselves into discontent, thus turning a perfectly fine existence into a cavern of self-reproach.

Somehow I can’t buy it, totally. Of course, people do live this way, and it’s a heartbreaking thing to witness. Yet it seems to me that happiness is always a choice. When we look at our lives we must realize that we have in fact chosen just about everything in our world. We could leave our job, our spouse, our children, even the country itself, but we choose not to. When we realize that this choice is something we selected, we can feel differently. I chose this spouse, this companion, not the other; I did so for reasons that suited me at the time, and I stay in the relationship for similar reasons.

We choose the life we have and in the process we are presented with important lessons that the soul has to come to terms with. Pretending that our lives could have been different merely stops us learning the soul lessons. That’s the real nub.

It’s time to learn those lessons.