Happiness Doesn’t Grow On Trees
Friday, August 12th, 2011“When I talk to people about happiness, I make sure to explain that if we expect to become truly happy in life, growth has to be a very important part of it. I wrote in an older post called “Grow for Happiness” that there is both spiritual and personal growth we can acquire. Personal growth can be obtained by education, but there is more to it than just becoming more knowledgeable about certain things. For example, our experiences in life combined with our reactions to them can help us grow as a person. Although good experiences can help us grow so can what we call bad experiences. It need not matter if we react well in the beginning to these types of experiences as long as we strive to learn from them and try to improve on how we think and react to them in the future. There is also spiritual growth, but because some people don’t believe in god, this type of growth may not always be favorable. However, if we look at spiritual growth with the idea of it being nothing more than trying to be a better person than we were before, it can be easy for an agnostic or even some atheists to attempt to grow in this way as well. For me, it also helped to be open minded and believe in the possibility that there may be something more than just this world. If you read my book, you would know how a search through science actually helped me to believe this. My point in all this is that growing both spiritually and as a person enables us to love ourselves enough to be happy with who we are, and is what I call true happiness. However, I recently talked with some people who while claiming to be happy, also said that drinking made them even happier, and this made me wonder if they’re actually as happy as they could be. Now I will tell you that I refuse to judge anyone who drinks, and I don’t really care if they do, but I do care when someone abuses alcohol and has an obvious dependency on it. Science and medicine has proven that alcohol and drugs changes a person’s brain chemistry over time by depleting the chemicals that helps make all of us feel happy in life. Science and medicine also tells us that some people become dependent on alcohol and drugs because they no longer find joy in some of the things that they used to in life without using a substance. Unfortunately, when this cycle goes on for too long, it can interfere with family, work, or a person’s health, and become what most experts call addiction. Now my purpose for this post wasn’t to give anyone a lesson on growth and happiness, or addiction so I’ll finish by making clear what my belief is about true happiness. I believe that life is about levels. There are different levels of wealth among people, and there are different levels of good and bad in all of us. There are different levels of education people obtain, and people have different levels of intelligence and common sense. There are different levels of spiritual and personal growth among people, and some people never try to grow at all. Now to bring my point home about true happiness, and hopefully truly end this writing. There are different levels of happiness in life too, and as I eluded to earlier, some people claim they’re as happy as they can be because of their drinking. I know how they feel because at one time in my life I really believed I was as happy as I could be and that drinking only made me happier. However, I also drank when I was sad or angry, and many times because I was full of fears and insecurities. When I look back over my sobriety now though, I can honestly say that personal growth helped me to experience a level of happiness that I never knew, and growing more spiritual helped me to experience a level of happiness that I didn’t believe possible. I can also say that for some of us happiness doesn’t grow on trees. We need to work on it until like some trees, even when we waver in stormy weather at times, we still remain standing as strong as we were before.
Tags: addiction, alcoholism, Happiness, personal growth, spiritual growth












