Misery loves company and it hates happiness!!!

Happy Wednesday!  I hope that everyone is having a great week building a happiness immune system against the forces of unhappiness that are trying to wage war against your happiness. If you are like millions of Americans, this is your hump day and the weekend is in sight. Can you feel it?  Visualize the happy things that you will be doing this weekend and let it float you through the rest of the week. If you are like the other millions of Americans and you are working this weekend, visualize your next day off. Use your next day off as a total recharging of the “Happiness Tank” kind of day. Now I am not a list kind of guy or a planner, but for this exercise make an itinerary and try to stick to it. Just like a car, we cannot run at our peak performance without the fuel and more importantly the right fuel.

The right fuel, yes the right fuel. A guy that I used to work with stormed into work one day ten minutes late, now this guy was never late. When we inquired were he had been he said on a slow trip here, upon further investigation, we found out that he had filled up his car a couple miles from his house, which was forty five minutes away from the store. When he got out on the highway his van immediately started sputtering and running slow with no power. He said his top speed on the highway was twenty miles per hour and it would hardly pull up the hills. About two miles into his trip he started visualizing filling up his car and then it hit him he had put diesel in his van that was only supposed to run on gasoline. Now I am not a mechanic and I am not mechanically inclined, so I had to ask does it run on diesel. His reply to me, not very well brother.

We as humans are not that much different to cars in the retrospect of fuel. We crave fuel like air, food, and we crave emotional fuel. So many times through our lives we forget that we crave emotional fuel and we need the right type of emotional fuel to function properly. When we start consuming emotional fuel that we think is good for us, but really isn’t, we are like my buddies van.  We make it a few miles feeling good and then we start to sputter. We start running slow and we become sluggish, no longer running at our peak performance. So many times in our life, this is self-inflicted, we cling to toxic situations and/or toxic people who drain our ‘happiness tanks” of the good fuel and fill us up with bad fuel. They hide in the shadows waiting to cling to someone who is happy and they drain them of that happiness, because they are miserable in their own lives. They have been so miserable for so long and they have no clue how to cure themselves.  All they know is how to be bitter and miserable. Why you ask do they befriend happy people?  Because misery loves company and it hates happiness.

So what happened to my buddies van that was mistakenly filled up with the wrong fuel? Well it had to be removed from the road, the tanks had to be cleaned, and then flushed, and then finally it was filled with the correct fuel. Yes it was expensive, but as the saying goes, “You say we can’t afford to do it and I say we can’t afford not to do it.” Like the van filled with the wrong fuel, sometimes we have to pull ourselves off of the road and place ourselves into the shop. We have to clean, flush, and refill our tanks with the right fuel. No one can tell you what your right fuel is, but you know what true happiness fills like. You know what makes you happy and what can flush your “Happiness Tank” of the toxins that are preventing you from running at your peak performance. You and only you know the way for you.

I will close with this thought.  My buddy is so paranoid about putting diesel fuel into his tanks that he won’t even stop at a gas pump that has both diesel and gasoline on the same pump. It costs him time and sometimes money fueling up at another station due to this but he isn’t willing to take the chance. In a future blog, I will revisit the topic of cutting out the toxic people and toxic situations in your life. Though it may cost you at the time, it will pay off in the long run, because misery loves company and it hates happiness!