What Is Your Happiness Quotient?

A Better Endings outlook is first and foremost a choice to maintain a positive attitude, despite or even especially in the face of life’s challenges. How can we maintain optimism, though, when beset by the heavy weight of a current problem? Recently I have stumbled upon a way out from under the otherwise debilitating burden of a pressing life situation.

I am transitioning out of my part-time job, one that I have deeply valued, because of an irresolvable environmental concern. I have been troubling over this decision, but I do know it is the right choice for me based on health considerations. So I have been mulling over this situation and yesterday arrived at a breakthrough realization that I am calling my “happiness quotient.”

I started counting my blessings compared to the negative factors I am moving through. I thought, well, most of my life remains positive, so I started adding up the percentages of positive aspects I am happy about in comparison to the elements that have been weighing me down.

For example (Readers, please make your own list), What I am Happy About:
* my pets, Sophie and Emily (healthy, loving companions)
* my family being nearer since my relocating
* good friends nearby, old and new, including my best high school buddy and her husband
* good friends I am still close with after all these years (many moons and and many moves!)
* My new book being released May 6 ! (see right panels for a Goodreads Giveaway and to pre-order)
* Continuing to teach anthropology online (my passion)
* my home environment: small hometown, river, lake, performing art center
* my spiritual practice and community activities
* my relative good health and prosperity
* my freedom

And What I am Unhappy or Challenged About (Readers again, please compose your own current list):
* leaving a job I have treasured and the people there whom I have been befriending
* the state of the world

So, when I count up my current factors for Happiness (N=10) against more negative factors (N=2), add them together (12) and calculate the percentage of happy to total factors (10/12 as x/100), I realize I have a Happiness Quotient of 84%. This awareness lifts my spirits and helps me to RELEASE what simply it is timely to Let Go!

Images are from pixabay.com

So, how about you? Try this one on for size. See if it might help you to put ‘things’ into a broader perspective. And importantly if it does not; if your Happiness Quotient turns out to be lower than you would like, then I would invite you to journal about (or contemplate or talk with your loved ones about) how you might introduce some better endings re-visioning into your current life chapter. What can you do to increase your happiness and to decrease the weight of current burdens?

Please feel free to share about your results in Comments below.

The Principle of BETTER ENDINGS

I am extremely grateful for this blog, the book it is prefacing, the agent who recommended it, and for all you readers whether checking in or visiting regularly.  Now Your Life Path will soon be circulated to publishers and I have a sequel book already in progress. The two main features of the approach I am sharing here and in these books are Life Mapping and the Principle of BETTER ENDINGS; these personal growth & development tools are closely interconnected.

Life Mapping is a process anyone can use  that I will be presenting as a complete rites of passage program in Your Life Path—Life Mapping to Live Your Dream, Now!  This tool allows you to  visually map  the significant, shaping events of your life and then to see how these have formed into Life Themes, Life Chapters, and a coherent Life Story that has mythic significance with you as the key dramatic protagonist! From the point of dwelling “at the Threshold” of awareness—indeed like standing at the top of a mountain, able to view vistas of past, present and possible futures—life mapping can help you to mine the potentials you have already  developed so as to “re-model” your future based on claiming or reclaiming and refining your own Life Dream.

This photo of Pikes Peak is courtesy of TripAdvisor

 Life Mapping can help you to discover pathways to your own Better Endings. But for today I would like to remind regular readers and introduce more recent and new readers of this blog to what I mean by the Principle of BETTER ENDINGS itself and how you can apply that, not only through life mapping but in your everyday life.

The first year of this blog (November 2013- November 2014; see calendar below) was called Better Endings, and it is here that I first explored and developed this concept and came to realize that it is indeed a principle that anyone can apply. It started to become apparent for me when I left a movie showing of the newest King Kong just before Kong was about to cascade off from the top of the Empire State Building to his imminent death; a death of primal significance metaphorically: a death of all that is primal and wild within all of us, within me. So I left the theatre and went to a coffeeshop where I took out my writing journal and rewrote the ending of this classic plot. In my version, Kong Lives! This was to me a Better Ending.   So I started practicing this approach with several other stories with endings I had always wished had resolved otherwise. I felt a giddy, almost guilty sense of satisfaction and empowerment, like I was discovering a freedom I never knew I had!

Try it sometime. Just think of a story whose ending you have never liked, and revise it! Maybe Juliet wakes up before Romeo swallows the poison, and they marry and live happily ever after.  Or maybe Lincoln never died from his bullet wound; it just grazed his forehead. Yes, history itself is an open field for re-visioning with this process.

Your own life is also a ripe, open terrain for replanting, re-visioning, re-modeling! The decisions you have made, moves, choices, risks taken or not, desires expressed fully or repressed; with every step we take in life we are re-routing our Life Path according to parallel realities!

So this is the principle of Better Endings that I am inviting you to explore and to practice. For me it has grown over time to become a principle I apply every day. Even writing this blog, for me, is an act of applying Better Endings. The principle is useful regardless of your spiritual path or philosophical bent.  It is something more than simply “positive thinking,” because better endings are not always necessarily “positive” in the maintsream sense, though they are positive for the person seeking valuable, meaningful change, adventure, or greater awareness.

I welcome your comments and stories!