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Choice—Your Ultimate Freedom

 If you still believe that you don’t choose to be unhappy, try to imagine this course of events. Each time you become unhappy you are subjected to some treatment you find unpleasant. 

Perhaps you are locked in a room alone for long periods of time or, conversely, forced into a crowded elevator where you must stand for days. 

You may be deprived of all food or forced to eat some dish you find particularly distasteful. Or perhaps you will be tortured—physically tortured by others, rather than mentally tortured by yourself. 

Imagine that you were subjected to any one of these punishments until you made your unhappy feelings go away. How long do you think you would continue to hold on to them?

Chances are you would take control rather quickly. So the issue is not whether you can take control of your feelings, but whether you will. What must you endure before you’ll make such a choice? 

Some people choose to go insane rather than take control. Others merely give up and succumb to a life of misery because the dividend of pity received is greater than the reward of being happy.

The issue here is your own ability to choose happiness or at least not to choose unhappiness at any given moment of your life. A mind-blowing notion perhaps, but one that you should consider carefully before rejecting, since to discard it is to give up on yourself. 

To reject it is to believe that someone else instead of you is in charge of you. But choosing to be happy might seem easier than some things which daily confound your life.

Just as you are free to choose happiness over unhappiness, so in the myriad events of everyday life you are free to choose self-fulfilling behavior over self-defeating behavior. 

If you drive in this day and age, chances are you find yourself frequently stuck in traffic. Do you become angry, swear at other drivers, berate your passengers, take your feelings out on anyone and anything in range? Do you justify your behavior by saying that traffic always sends you into a snit, that you simply have no control in a traffic jam? 

If so, you are accustomed to thinking certain things about yourself and the way you act in traffic. But what if you decided to think something else? What if you chose to use your mind in a self-enhancing kind of way? 

It would take time but you could learn to talk to yourself in new ways, to become accustomed to new behavior which might include whistling, singing, turning on a tape recorder to write verbal letters, even timing yourself with thirty-second postponements of your anger. 

You have not learned to like the traffic but you have learned to practice, very slowly at first, new thoughts. You have decided not to be uncomfortable. You have chosen to substitute in slow progressive steps healthy new feelings and habits for old self-defeating emotions.

You can choose to make any experience enjoyable and challenging. Dull parties and committee meetings are fertile territory for choosing new feelings.

When you find yourself bored, you can make your mind work in exciting ways, by changing the subject with a key observation, or writing the first chapter of your novel, or working on new plans which will help you to avoid these settings in the future. 

Using your mind actively means assessing the people and events which give you the greatest difficulty and then deciding on new mental efforts to make them work for you. 

In a restaurant, if you typically get upset over poor service, think first of why you should not choose to be upset because someone or something is not going the way you would like it to go. You’re too worthy to be upset by someone else, especially someone who is so unimportant in your life. 

Then devise strategies to change the setting, or leave, or whatever. But don’t just get perturbed. Use your brain to work for you, and eventually you’ll have the terrific habit of not being upset when things go wrong.

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