Why I Pray In The Shower

I was looking through my year book the other day to help me remember what some of my old class mates, who are now my facebook friends looked like in high school and got a little sad.  It wasn’t because of my old memories of not having many friends back then, but because it made me realize how fast the years went by since high school. It took a long time for me to learn how to be happy in life and now it seems that time is moving faster each day. I do realize of course that perhaps time went by just as quickly when I was drinking and unhappy, but I think the real sadness I felt came from realizing I only have so many years left here on this Earth. The good news is that one of the ways I have learned to be happy in life is to turn this sadness around and try to make each day the best I can. I have also learned not to let the little things, or for that matter the big things bother me as much.  Time may seem to be passing by way more quickly today now that I’m happy and older, but it’s a good feeling to know that my time isn’t being wasted like it was back in my drinking days. Instead it’s being used to help others realize just how precious life is and that we really can create our own happiness while we’re here.

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Tags: alcoholism, Darryl Duke, drinking, Happiness, high school, memories, why i pray in the shower

My life has shown me that growing both spiritually and as a person helps us find greater happiness in life and with ourselves.  A combination of growth that when continued, keeps leading us to greater and greater levels of happiness.  However this true happiness does require faith on our part and in some cases like with myself at times, work.  Sometimes when I’m feeling down or troubled I have to try harder to believe in more than just this world and in myself to get through the doubts and fears that are at the heart of how I’m feeling.  I eventually do though, and on the days when my belief in a creator I call God and myself are at their strongest, I feel a joy like no other happiness I have ever experienced. This joy is what I call true happiness and even a glimpse of it, can make us want to experience it more and more.

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Tags: believing in ourselves, over coming doubts and fears, personal and spiritual growth, self-confidence, true happiness

I wrote in my book that we can be happier in life by trying to be a better person than we were and how doing so isn’t always that easy. Sometimes I don’t feel like being a loving and kind person or want to be understanding and tolerant of someone who isn’t being any of those things themselves.  I do try though, and even if I am the slightest bit unkind to someone, I will apologize and tell that person it’s not who I am or who I want to be. I then move on and try harder next time to be the person I say I am.  This is simply a part of growing spiritually and it helps me to be happier in life. There are other ways we can be better than we were before that doesn’t involve spiritual growth that can also help us be happier in life. I have learned that if I’m open minded and try to understand other peoples views on things, it can go along way in being better able to practice love and kindness toward them and becoming better educated on things I don’t understand. Many times after I listen to what someone else thinks about something that interests me, even though I may disagree with what they are telling me, I still investigate what they told me and sometimes learn something about the subject I didn’t know before. It doesn’t always lead to me changing my own views on whatever the subject was, but it does help me to try and find some common ground to stand on with that person and accept them for who they are and what they believe in. This then adds to the happiness I feel from growing spiritually because I know I’m also growing as a person. This self education along with my continued quest to be a spiritual person is one of the main reasons for my happiness in life and also helps me to love myself enough to be happy with who I am, even when I sometimes still behave like someone I’m not.

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Tags: finding happiness, Happiness, happy with self, self love, self worth, self-esteem

Short answer? Loving yourself enough to be happy with who you are. Long answer? Well for the sake of keeping it simple, I’ll still make this a short a short answer, but with a little more detail.  Happiness simply comes from trying to be a better person.   Not better than other people, but better than you were before.  Now I must confess it took a lot of practice for me to become a better person than I was before and I’ll further confess that I can still fail at being a better person on some occasions.   However, I know in my heart that today I truly am a good person and try not to beat myself up over it. This is because somewhere along the line I also began to love myself unconditionally.   Now for the detail part. I mentioned how it took a lot of practice for me to become a better person and this is the basic idea behind anyone wanting to be happier in life and eventually loving themselves enough to be happy with who they are.  How can you not feel good about yourself when you try as best you know how to be a more loving person than you were before? And how can you not feel good about yourself if you try and show more kindness to others than you did before? Also how can you not feel good about yourself, if at the very least you try  to be more understanding of why people you don’t like behave in ways that upset you, and practice a little more tolerance towards them? The answer is that you cannot help but to start feeling better about yourself and this is where happiness ultimately has to start. Being happy in life was all I ever wanted to be, and I found out that by simply practicing love, kindness, understanding, and tolerance towards others and myself, it helped me to achieve that. However, what I didn’t know was that after this began to happen it would someday lead to being happy with who I was.  Of course as you know if you’ve been reading my blog.  It helps to also try and believe there’s a creator that gave us the ability to be happy, but that’s another story, mine.

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Tags: addiction, alcoholism, finding happiness, Happiness, true happiness, why i pray in the shower