A smile may brighten up your day, but it won't change your life.

   Happiness isn't a smiley face. It's a smiley life, and lives are concrete and very complicated.

   However, as complicated as you may be, you still break down into two basic blocks: there's what you are, and there's who you are. Both of them are essential to happiness.


What you are

The simpler of the two. You're human. Because of that simple fact, in general there are things that will make you and there are things that will break you.

   The things that will break you are easy to pinpoint. They can be physical like poison, or ethical like murder. And they will always destroy happiness. So avoid them.

   The things that will make you are harder to identify because they aren't concrete. They're general goals for life... things that everyone has to do but in different ways. Helping others. Taking care of yourself. Doing good. To do them, you need to figure out what they mean in your life.


Who you are

That's where general goodness starts to take concrete shape in your life. Doing good? For a wife that means loving a husband who's fighting cancer. For the doctor, that means healing the same man. Loving and healing are both good, even great. But they're different. They will make different people happy. And if they're inverted, they will make the same people very sad.


Happiness for you

After God, the second step towards happiness is Yourself. You don't choose what you are. And in many cases you've already chosen who you are. For example, you're married. And choosing marriage as your path to happiness meant that you had to close off others.

   That's life. Progress towards happiness means choosing well - and bringing God into your choices. He made you. He knows what he made you for. He knows who he made you for. He knows who he made you to be. Talk to him about it.

   But happiness also means not going back on who you are. And that coherence is the base for the next step.

To read the complete series go to:

Benjamin O'Loughlin writes for www.formationtoolbox.com

This Catholic Formation Service is also available by e-mail.