Scenario one: you are in perfect health and in a loving relationship. You are not rich but your material needs are met. You live in a society that allows you to be yourself. However, people treat each other poorly. Kindness is rare and hardly anyone will ever lend a helping hand, no matter what the need. Are you happy there?
Read the entire post on my y1 blog at Some Kind of Kindness.
Reason number one: Love makes us happy, and happiness is wonderful.
Several times now I’ve posted about a report on which countries have the happiest people. I’m intrigued that six attributes account for most of this variation, and I summed them up as health, wealth, freedom, love, fairness and kindness. I’ve already written about the first three and today I’m thinking about love.
Read the entire post on my y1 blog at Four Reasons I Love It When “Love Wins”.
Well, yes, wanting your coffee in a mug that matches your clothes is probably not normal, but my friend should know by now that I never thought she was normal, and I honestly don’t know anyone else who is either.
Read the entire post on my y1 blog at None of us are normal, if we’re lucky.
My dad used to say “Work fascinates me. I can sit and watch someone do it all day.” Sometimes I think I have the same relationship with happiness.
Read the entire post on my y1 blog at Happiness fascinates me.
It is hard to believe. Whatever happened to the idea that the ultimate in happiness was lounging on a tropical beach, umbrella drink in hand, while island music wafted by on a soft ocean breeze? Wait, that was the ideal vacation. What about the ideal life?
Read the entire post at on my y1 blog at If you want to be happy move to a cold country?
I’m serious. I spent hours doing this. I have no idea why.
Then, of course, I grew older and filled my life up the way that adults do and I forgot about my favorite fantasy. A few decades passed, and now I realize that I should have given it more thought. If I had, I might have realized that …
Read the entire post on my y1 blog at It didn’t take a spaceship.
To be fair, a lot of my previous resolutions have been half-hearted, born of the need to answer someone else’s question about what I was striving for in the year ahead. So I was surprised when yesterday, out of nowhere, I knew exactly what it was that I would resolve to do in the coming months.
Read the rest of this post at 
My Best New Year’s Resolution Yet.
It was in the midst of such a Christmas day today, with my second Kentucky Mule in hand, my signature dish boiling over on the stove and a pile of dirty dishes that would daunt a restaurant staff in front of me, that I realized I was happy.
Read the entire post at Happy yet? Yes, I believe that I am.
What you probably want to know in each case is what decision will make me happiest. Hmm. That’s complicated. Happiest when? At first? Overall, averaged over your entire life? Or would you rather go for comparing the single happiest moment along each path? Or how about the fewest miserable moments?
Read the rest of this post at If you could see the future, would you want to?
I know that when I arrive at the office in the morning, I look more or less normal. I’m a few minutes late, car keys still in my hand as I give the receptionist a half-apologetic wave and head back to the small cubicle that is my home for about nine hours a day, four days a week. I fire up my computer, get some coffee, and start to do the things I am paid to do. It’s not so bad. The work is mildly entertaining, the pay is good, the coffee acceptable. I do hate the windowless cube, but I’m luckier that most. I have a secret life.
Read the rest of the post at My Secret Life
That’s incredibly cool, I thought. In a burst of altruism I decided to donate ten percent of my proceeds from the book x0 to this organization. Be it a little or a lot, it seemed a good way to put something back.
Lest I sound more generous than I am, it is fair to mention that my husband and I have a fairly dismal record donating to charities. We mean well, we really do, but we tend to be too busy or having some kind of costly emergency ourselves and giving money to worthy causes just doesn’t seem to happen….
So yes, I sent the check off to Doctor’s Without Borders a few weeks ago, and just got back a wonderful little letter acknowledging what I was doing with my novel and thanking me for it. Terribly cool. I’m going to frame it and hang it in my study. I had no idea that being an author would have the potential to provide joys in so many ways.
Read the entire post at Writing for a Cause
It occurred to me to wonder what were the best songs ever written about joy. I am rather joyful tonight. And music, being such a shared activity, is a wonderful way to communicate happiness.
According to the kids’ song, it’s the wheels on the bus …. but some days it’s the thoughts in the head, the feelings in the heart, and excitement in your soul that you can hardly contain as it all twirls and spins with the very force that powers the universe…
Joy is in the brain, no doubt about it. True wishes for a happy new year ought to be less about good fortune in the times ahead and more about wishes for the wisdom to enjoy whatever does happen, and about the good sense to learn from the things that don’t go well. I’d like to point this out to my well wishers, but it seems ungrateful to correct people when they are trying to be nice. So I smile instead, and wish them a happy new year back.
Read the full post at My secret new year wish for you
The first step is feeling joy … a smile, a laugh, a sense of exuberance that that life itself can feel so very good. It is easier to experience this kind of delight, of course, when one is somewhere beautiful, or surrounded by caring people, or doing things one likes. All of the above is really good. …… and highly recommended.
Read the entire post at Holding on to the joy.
While it sounds great to say that taking this medication is “fixing chemical imbalances in the brain,” the problem is that no one gets to do experiments on a live human brain. Thankfully. And dead human brains don’t send chemical messages and can’t be depressed. Neither really can animals, at least those generally accepted for grisly lab experiments. So no one actually knows whether depressed people have less serotonin in their brains.
Read more at How happy is your brain?
When I was in grade school, they told me to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I wrote down happy.
They told me I didn’t understand the assignment,
I told them they didn’t understand life.
— author unknown
Read more at Happy now?
Think Too Much
Care Too Much
Get in Fights
Don't Say Much
Don't Keep Quiet
Don't Behave
Scare Them All
Save the World
See the Future
Explore Another Reality
Tinker with Time
Look Like Anyone
Become a Telepath
S. R. Cronin 