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14. Autobiography Of A Late-Blooming Angel

I got my angelic fixation from being so happy for so long. I've been happy for about three years now. I don't know exactly what produced this happiness-breakthrough (perhaps meditation) but I'm proving daily to myself (and others) how to keep it going. If I can do this, believe me, anyone can. What I do is consciously choose to follow my joy. I'm finally choosing to obey The Supreme Being's instructions (explicitly given by practically every religion and by every Guru I know about) to relax and be happy. I've been doing this, with very few exceptions, for a coupla/three years. If I don't perceive any joy in what I'm doing or about to do, I just stop, slow down or just don't do it. I simply STOP and then wait until it feels good. My modus operandi is to think about what I'm doing and answer the question, "Why am I doing this?" If the answer isn't some variant of happiness, joy, contentment, peace of mind, serenity, etc., I stop. I saw a Ben & Jerry's bumper sticker the other day that advised, "If It Doesn't Feel Good / Why Do It?" That's me folks, I'm getting advice on how to run my life from a bumper sticker!

In the beginning, way back in January 2000, I thought acting this way would be tough to do, time consuming and maybe even selfish. I was worried about remaining a functioning family member, upright citizen and all-around nifty guy but it turns out to be amazingly simple and not selfish at all. What is absolutely mind-boggling is to discover that my joy affects other people in a positive way. More about this phenomenon later.

The first thing I did is to learn to recognize things and situations that have no perceivable joy in them for me. These things and situations are more or less obvious now and a snap for me to avoid. Now I just say 'Excuse me' and leave. Automobile accidents, family quarrels, 'news' stories of murder, rape, sea tragedies, plane crashes, etc., etc., no longer have a fascination for me. I'm actually following the advice of L. Ron Hubbard (of Scientology fame) to turn off the TV and stop reading newspapers for two weeks and notice how much better you feel as a result. Well, I'm here to say that it works. To monitor the news, particularly the political news that interests me, I scan the Internet and very selected TV news outlets. All other TV watching consists of upbeat shows and sports. I'm very carefully avoiding inputs from anybody and anywhere that have a down-tone quality to them.

For most of my life I occasionally pursued stuff I knew in my heart was not going to produce joy. From just before the madness of puberty, which, in my case, lasted far, far past my teen years, to a little over a year ago I justified my bad choices by saying, "At the time, your honor, it seemed like the right thing to do". I didn't want to be ignorant, I wanted to be experienced and how could I be experienced unless I tried a few things? Sound familiar? I found out the hard way that a tiny bit of experience can and should be logically extrapolated. I didn't have to OD on heroin or alcohol or anything else to learn to control or avoid it. My old reliable body announced (loudly) its findings to me. I just had to stop, slow down and listen to it. After all, how many hangovers and how much self-disgust did I need before I showed alcohol (or sex) with the respect it deserves? Now, there's no doubt about it, the spirit was talking to me too, but since its messages came in a softer and quieter way, I just didn't listen. Well now I'm listening. I'm actually paying attention to those subtle (but insistent) feelings of uneasiness.

Incidentally, I don't feel terribly sorry about what I did in my mad impetuous youth (of sixty-plus years) because then was then and now is now. And why should I choose to feel bad now about what I did then? It's odds-on that I'm the only one who remembers it anyway! My own personal joy, i.e., what I want to do at any given moment is also an easy choice if I continue to use my own criterion to be happy. What is difficult about picking one of all of the things that please you? It's just a matter of priorities and if I want to continue to earn money rather than hitchhike around the world that's my choice and I'm certainly not unhappy about it. It's a chocolate-versus-vanilla choice.

My choices are a little more difficult to assess when I'm with someone else. Let's suppose I want to do X and someone else wants me to do Y. What I do now is rate the happiness content of my X versus their Y, decide which is greater, let's say Y, and simply pick Y. The outcome of Y if it's successful is nice, but the outcome is not critical or necessary for me to feel good because I can feel good just doing my best. You might think that this seemingly namby-pamby attitude would leave me with no time to do my X but that doesn't happen. I always have time to do my X's, they're just delayed. When I finally get around to doing them, I'm not unhappy with the delay because I'm only dealing in levels of happiness, someone else's and mine. There ain't no unhappiness involved. Not even if I never get around to doing my X's because I'm having fun in the doing part NOT in the result part.

It was, and is, very important to me to understand that happiness is an exclusively personal matter and not assume that I am responsible for anyone else's happiness. That's a trap, old buddies, and we should all know it. The best anyone can do for others is to aid them in making their choices for their happiness. If they're unhappy with your choices then, unless you are consciously causing unhappiness, it is their problem and not yours. The phrases "with malice aforethought" and "premeditated action" are key here. And the thing is, I can't be happy if I'm causing unhappiness. I don't do that kind of thing and I don't think you do either. Maybe some people do but we don't and that's because you and I have learned that doing bad things makes us unhappy. Does this make us angels?

I'm a septuagenarian retiree now and, I've gotten precisely to where I am because of a series of choices I made. Of course other people, like the North Koreans and my children, were involved; but there's no denying it, all my choices were mine (and yours were yours). Only when I reflected on my choices did it become obvious to me that the joyful choices produced joy and the unhappy choices produced unhappiness. Since it is technically impossible to do something one doesn't want to do the light bulb went on and I realized that, willy-nilly, I was ignorantly choosing to be unhappy. So I said to myself, "Self, don't do that" and now I don't. I simply and consciously choose to be happy. (In case anyone is wondering, writing this stuff gives me intense joy even if no one reads it.)

The phenomenon I mentioned earlier is my discovery that joy is contagious and that if I'm happy the feeling spreads out. It should have been blindingly obvious to me, as a very long-time fan of stand-up comedians, that both good and bad feelings have a rippling effect but it wasn't. I'm just a late-bloomer.

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