The idea that happiness, or keeping one’s thoughts pleasant most of the time, can be deliberately and systematically cultivated by practicing in a more or less cold-blooded manner, strikes many of my patients as rather incredible, if not ludicrous, when I first suggest it. Yet experience has shown not only that this can be done, but that it is about the only way that the “habit of happiness” can be cultivated. In the first place happiness isn’t something that happens to you. It is something you yourself do and determine upon. If you wait for happiness to catch up with you, or “just happen,” or
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