Happiness Is a Choice You Make Quotes

“The good things in life-happiness, purpose, contentment, companionship, beauty, and love-have been there all along. We don't need to earn them. Good food, friends, art, warmth, worth-these are the things we have already. We just need to choose them as our lives.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“Researchers have long observed that older people who feel a sense of purpose in their lives tend to live longer, fuller,”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“The lesson was to find happiness not in the absence of pain and loss, but in their acceptance.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been. —David Bowie”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“I choose art and beauty, vague as those terms are, against ugliness and horrors in which we live today. For somebody to look at a flower or listen to music does something to one, has a positive effect, and being surrounded by ugliness and horror does something negative. So I feel my duty not to betray those poets, scientists, saints, singers, troubadours of the past centuries who did everything that humanity would become more beautiful. I have to continue in my small way their work.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“They saw themselves as sums not of their disabilities but of their strategies for living with them.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“Being an expert is exhausting. Being a student-letting go of your ego-is like sitting for a banquet at the best restaurant you'll ever visit.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“Gratitude, purpose, camaraderie, love, family, usefulness, art, pleasure-all these are within my grasp, requiring of me only that I receive them.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“It's a kind of moral dictum, moral responsibility to keep in mind that whatever I do this second affects what the next second will be. So I try not to do anything negative, which is my best insurance that the world will be better next second, or at least not worse.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“Have you ever thought about how amazing, really amazing, life is?”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“One could live to two hundred. But yet I see some young people, twenty years old, and they seem to be bored already with life, and some of them cannot stand it. That’s something else.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“problems were only problems if you thought about them that way. Otherwise they were life—and yours for the living.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“When you’re old, you have to make yourself happy. Otherwise you get older.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“We do ourselves a big favor not to be scared of growing old, but to embrace the mixed bag that the years have to offer, however severe the losses.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“cram into whatever brief time was left to him. At our first meeting, back in early 2015, I’d thought he was one of the most morbid people I’d ever met. But I was mistaken. The lesson of John Sorensen was that to accept death was to accept life, and to accept life was to live in joy, however dire the circumstances around you.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“In his oncology practice, Emanuel said that at some point his patients all described cancer as the best thing that ever happened to them, because it made them concentrate on what was important in life.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“In 1977 a psychologist and epidemiologist named Ernest M. Gruenberg at Johns Hopkins University called the rise of these immiserating diseases the “failures of success”: the more the health care system enabled people to survive to old age, the more they developed chronic diseases that sucked the quality out of life. Gruenberg argued that we should view health care as an epidemiological force, like a pathogen, which reduces rates of death but increases rates of sickness and disability. The system’s priorities were twisted, Gruenberg believed, because it was preoccupied with extending life, not health. So research dollars went to picking off the acute causes of death, which tend to work pretty quickly, rather than to delaying or preventing chronic diseases that drag on and on, bringing whole families into their circle of pain. To Gruenberg, this went against the oath to do no harm. If cancer patients typically die of pneumonia, say, and we develop treatments for pneumonia, all we’ve done for their cancer is ensure that they spend more years dying of it. In place of a day on their deathbed, we’ve given them a month and called it progress. “Instead of enhancing the people’s health this kind of deathly thinking has been increasing the people’s sickness and disability,” he wrote. “Now that we recognize that our life-saving technology of the past four decades has outstripped our health-preserving technology and that the net effect has been to worsen the people’s health, we must begin the search for preventable causes of the chronic illnesses which we have been extending.” Yes, medicine was helping us live longer, Gruenberg said, but the extra years were added at the end, when we were too weak or sick to enjoy them.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“At eighty I believe I am a far more cheerful person than I was at twenty or thirty. I most definitely would not want to be a teenager again. Youth may be glorious, but it is also painful to endure.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“At her work, Judy gives her staff a passage from Wendy Lustbader, the mental health counselor and writer, to help them understand the pitfalls of caregiving relationships. Lustbader writes: Receiving is much harder than giving, but this fact is seldom recognized in mainstream American society. Dependent people are often deprived of chances to give, finding that they must endure a state of almost constant relinquishment and passivity. Consequently, the person receiving help accumulates a debt to the other and must bear the weight of feeling beholden day in and day out. There are few means through which the person can pay back a caregiver for rides to the doctor, help with medical bill paperwork, handling loads of laundry, and check-up telephone calls—the list of favors owed can be immense. The dependent person may yearn for something useful to do, only to be admonished, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of everything.” For family caregivers, Lustbader notes the hidden resentments that arise from the relationship’s asymmetry. Caring is mutual; caregiving can be all one way, a drain on both parties. But acknowledging the underlying dynamic can take away its sting. “The reward for recognizing resentment,” Lustbader writes, “is enjoying the ill person’s company again.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“One compelling explanation for the elders’ greater contentment comes from the psychologist Laura L. Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Her hypothesis, which she gave the wonky name “socioemotional selectivity,” is that older people, knowing they face a limited time in front of them, focus their energies on things that give them pleasure in the moment, whereas young people, with long horizons, seek out new experiences or knowledge that may or may not pay off down the line. Young people fret about the things they don’t have and might need later; old people winnow the things they have to the few they most enjoy. Young people kiss frogs hoping they’ll turn into princes. Old people kiss their grandchildren. “It’s hard to get an eighty-five-year-old to take inorganic chemistry,” Carstensen said. Maybe old people live literally like there’s no tomorrow.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“Living too long scared them; dying was the antidote to living too long.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“The lesson of John Sorensen was that to accept death was to accept life, and to accept life was to live in joy, however dire the circumstances around you.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“certain friends and family members who just brought me down—I let them go and didn’t miss them.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“seminars less in aging than in living.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“Health problems that looked devastating to me looked to them like a part of life’s progress after eighty-five—what was truly bad was always a step down the road.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“In a culture that constantly tells us to overcome our limitations, sometimes it is more productive to find ways to live with them. For people”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“When you are young and impaired, you are expected to fix the problem. When you are old and impaired, you are encouraged to accept it.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“older people are more content, less anxious or fearful, less afraid of death, more likely to see the good side of things and accept the bad, than young adults.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

“Being a student—letting go of your ego—is like sitting for a banquet at the best restaurant you’ll ever visit.”
― John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old