Authentic Happiness

I've picked up again a book I bought two years ago. The reviews and blurb sounded good at the time, but I never got past the first chapter. It crossed my mind again the other day, and is a great example of how sometimes you're just not ready to hear/understand a principle until later, when circumstances have changed.


The author, Martin E. P. Seligman, teaches that despite our personality makeup, there are certain choices we have the power to make that will make us happier people, that overall, happiness is a choice. He tells a wonderful story of a paradigm shift he experienced as a result of a lesson taught by his five-year-old daughter, Nikki, while working in the garden. The following is an excerpt. 

I have to confess that even though I have written a book and many articles about children, I'm actually not very good with them. I am goal-oriented and time-urgent and when I'm weeding in the garden, I'm weeding. Nikki, however, was throwing weeds into the air and dancing and singing. Since she was distracting me, I yelled at her, and she walked away. Within a few minutes she was back, saying, "Daddy, I want to talk to you."

"Yes, Nikki?"

"Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From when I was three until I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. On my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn't going to be a whiner anymore.

"That was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch."

This was an epiphany for me. In terms of my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch. I had spent fifty years enduring mostly wet weather in my soul, and the last ten years as a walking nimbus cloud in a household radiant with sunshine. Any good fortune I had was probably not due to being grumpy, but in spite of it. In that moment, I resolved to change.

More importantly, I realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting her shortcomings. She could do that herself. Rather, my purpose in raising her was to nurture this precocious strength she had displayed - I call it seeing into the soul, but the jargon is social intelligence - and help her to mold her life around it. Such a strength, fully grown, would be a buffer against her weaknesses and against the storms of life that would inevitably come her way. Raising children, I knew now, was far more than just fixing what was wrong with them. It was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.