‘Happiness is a choice’
MANILA, Philippines - As we grow up, the naiveté that comes with childhood is lost, the expectations of society surround us, and the seeds of achieving success are planted. We go to school, we strive to attain the best grades possible and we work towards a passion that will hopefully lead to success. We’re told that once we find something we love and pursue that goal, we’ll find success and that will, in turn, lead us to happiness.
But what all those profound lectures and life-altering books don’t tell you is that happiness is, in fact, a choice.
Blue-eyed and curious, author and illustrator Andrew Matthews had always thought of happiness as something like influenza; a viral disease that either infects a person or doesn’t. He, like many others, was fascinated with how some people around him were able to live interesting and successful lives. He saw these people go through more challenging things than he, yet they still were grateful for what they had endured and sustained a positive attitude. After many experiences he learned that despite the many “pits” we encounter in our lives, the only thing that will truly help us surpass these obstacles is if we choose to focus only on the good things that have happened.
Similar to many authors, Matthews writes from his own experiences. He encountered one of his larger “pits” in the process of publishing his first manuscript. In an author’s world, it is known that getting your work published is a difficult task and keeping this in mind, Matthews sent his first manuscript to 60 publishers. He got 61 rejections. (One publisher rejected his work twice!) In October 1983, he started to look at life in a different way; inspired by many personal development books, Matthews was eager to write the beginnings of his book, Being Happy. Although the personal development books he read offered good information, he felt they required too much concentration to read, were boring and didn’t have enough cartoons.
Learning how to draw in mathematics class, Matthews was excited to share the ideas that were helpful to him in a way that was both entertaining (with cartoons, of course) and accessible. “Good writing is simple,” he says. In his newest book, How Life Works, he reminds us that success doesn’t equal happiness. If this were the case, our perception of happiness would constantly get readjusted because once we achieve our goals, new ones would be subconsciously put into place. Happiness, Matthew believes, is achieved through the way we choose to see things. It is a “decision that we make, it’s not an accident. It’s not something that is necessarily easy sometimes, but if we look for good things in those around us or in our day, we find that our day starts to work better. All we have to do is apply that strategy every day of our life and our life starts to feel better.” That’s how life works, Matthews says.
“Pain is inevitable but misery is a choice,” he continues, and although he is the artist behind empowering books, Matthews admits that he, too, can get off-track. He’s lucky enough to have a wife, Julie, who puts him back in his place. “You write the happy books,” she says. Matthews’ enlightening novels not only remind us that things go wrong but that we should strive to look for the good and positive things that happen every day — even if they’re just little things. Our perception is like a donut, he says: miserable people focus on what’s missing and look through the hole, while happy people focus on what they have and marvel at the donut itself. Thus, Matthews forces us to ask ourselves: Will I be the one that chooses to see the donut or looks through the hole?
