Your happiness is your responsibility.

Happiness comes from appreciating what you are and what you have, accepting life as it is and focusing your expectations on yourself not the world around you.

We are a materialistic society. Many of us just want things, stuff as though getting more stuff will ever satisfy us. It is happiness we are looking for.

Yet how many of us ever stop to think that we are responsible for our own happiness? Happiness is not something we discover under a rock somewhere.

Happiness is Joy in the Moment.  Happiness is appreciating a breath of fresh air. Happiness is appreciating our wife, our children, our friends.

So much of life is chance that we do not control. The only control we have is our self our immediate space.

We expect the world to respond to our control, to behave as we expect and plan our lives. I expected my parents would live to a ripe old age. Yet I am older that my father was when he died.

I expect that my neighbour hood will be safe. Yet, I hear of gang murders and child abductions. Not that these events happen as often as the media seems to suggest. But, nevertheless, these events are beyond our control.

If we expect the world to bow to our superior knowledge, then we are creating unrealistic expectations.  And in the face of expectations, we become very frustrated, depressed and unhappy.

This brings us to our third contributor to happiness. Accept whatever life hands you because Life is about living and experiencing. Yes, even the economic downturn is experience.

Without trying to relive your experience, but simply evaluating it, try to find the lesson in each of those memories. If you focus on the moment, on experiencing life as it comes to you, then you will be aware that reviewing memories is life in the moment.

An exercise I have often used to get out of a blue-funk is to suddenly become aware of all the things around you. Focus on the computer as a machine, on your cup of coffee, on the rest of the furniture, the colour of the walls, the colour of the sky through the window. Notice the green of new flowers growing, the buds on the trees.

Happiness is being aware that you are alive, being aware that you breathe, appreciating the roof over your head no matter how humble, enjoying the food you eat, enjoying the touch of your spouse's hand, the smile on a child's face.

Even if you can no longer work because you have lost your job, you can enjoy those things, your family, you life as it is. You are on a journey, so enjoy as you travel through the time you are given.

Appreciate yourself, your family, your friends. Make your expectations only focus on yourself, how you want to behave. Accept the experiences that life gives you. They are neither good nor bad. They simply are.