Happy Friday!!!

Tomorrow night at midnight you will have finished a 10,080 minute journey. No matter how many minutes you spent this week in the happiness realm or how many you spent in the unhappiness realm, as long as you learned this week you have succeeded. Happiness isn’t a destination.  It is a journey and along that journey there will be ups and downs. There will be good times and bad times. We all stumble from time to time, but that has little to do with anything. As long as we learn, change, and prepare for the next week we are not failures. Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I believe that the same can be said about failure in the retrospect of being happy.

Life is an investment plan. We choose to invest time in certain situations and time in certain people expecting a result. If you aren’t expecting a positive result, then there may just be something wrong with you. You should never invest in anything that you believe will yield a negative result.  That my friend is just asking for bad karma. Everything you do inside your 10,080 minutes in one week should yield a positive return for you. There is so much in this world that we can’t control that bombards us with negativity; why chose negativity on our own. Even when I choose to relax on the couch and watch a TV show, I expect a positive return on my investment. Maybe that return is as little as I get to shut the world out for thirty minutes and recharge my “Happiness Tank!” A friend of mine once said in reference to a TV show, “it’s mindless entertainment” meaning one didn’t have to use their mind to understand it. My response was “Perfect.  It gives my mind time to rest and therefore my return on my investment is positive.”

As we close out the week and prepare for the weekend, I challenge you to view this weekend like you did as a kid. Remember back when the weekend was 48 hours of possibility and Monday looked so far away. When you played so hard that come Sunday you were literally exhausted from laughing and having so much fun. I want you to maximize the positivity and minimize the negativity as much as you possibly can this weekend. Have so much fun that you start the next week with your “Happiness Tanks” overflowing. Choose to be a kid again for one weekend.  Search out those things that use to make you happy and revisit them again. For those of you that have to work, find some time over the weekend to put this into play. Find the positive and weed out the negative.

Now, I know that some of you are facing some real life ‘life and death’ situations. I get that, I really do.  I have been there, but what I am speaking of truly can help even in the face of great tragedy. When my first wife died, I did a lot of personal internal inventories of myself. I learned that my first wife never tried to change me when she was alive and she sure the hell wouldn’t try to change me in death. She knew that I was a practical joker and that I loved to have fun.  She knew that I was born a happy soul. She never held me back in that area while she was alive and I felt she would be disappointed if I didn’t act like that after she died. It wasn’t easy to be the life of the party afterwards, but I knew she expected it of me. It was hard but even then I tried to maximize the positive and minimize the negative. I believe that if a person truly loves you, they would not want you to be miserable even in their death. They expect you to choose happiness over sadness; in fact I believe they would encourage it.

 
I love the minutes between the close of the week and the start of the week.  It’s the time to relax, reflect, and recharge. Use these minutes wisely, because they will be the minutes that set up the week ahead. How will you start the next week.  Will you be behind the game or ahead of it?  The choice truly is yours.