Member-only story
The Battle Between Happy and Sad
Finding peace
Happy and Sad love to have fun on the playground. One of their favorite games is the see-saw. Happy will get on one end and Sad on the other and for hours they will go up and down, up and down.
Happiness utterly depends on conditions being perceived as positive. Sadness utterly depends on conditions being perceived as negative. It’s all about perception.
How we perceive our world is usually a conditioned reaction. Since childhood we have been trained how to perceive things and situations. We have been taught that a small child playing with a puppy is a good thing and a happy thing so when we see it we automatically perceive it as a good thing and we are happy. We have been taught that a masked man bludgeoning a puppy with a baseball bat is a bad thing so we perceive it thusly and we become sad.
That’s just basic noggin science. Our world is full of good things and bad things so we are constantly vacillating between happy and sad, like the ongoing up and down of the see-saw. Of course everyone wants to be happy. We can change our environment to one that contains mostly good things and we can change our perceptions of things to be more positive — or some combination thereof. We can become happier and less sad by altering our life situation and perception of it.
