[Review] Happiness is A Choice You Make

Happiness Is A Choice You Make - Lessons from a year among the oldest old by John Leland weaves together the stories and wisdom of six New Yorkers who number among the “oldest old”― those eighty-five and up. A fairly good read with nuggets of wisdom from the seniors on living with contentment, despite the challenges of old age they face. I can't write as good a review as those already found on Amazon so I'll put some favourite passages from the book (and there's quite a fair number of them!) here instead.


Chapter 4: Love in the Time of Lipitor

If my year with the elders was also to be a love story, this was a lesson that I needed to learn: that in a relationship, sometimes taking - allowing the other person to do something for you, rather than insisting on doing it yourself - is also a kind of giving. The same applies in friendships or business relationships. True generosity includes enabling others to be generous.

Chapter 5: On the Other Hand ...

I knew successful people who thought they were open-minded because they were willing to listen to opposing views before rejecting them. But wisdom, John was saying, lay in accepting them even when you listened and weren't persuaded.

Contentment had been there for the grasping, if only I had recognized it. Probably it's there for you. The elders would tell you to grab it while you can, not agitate for something better. They don't have time for delusions, including the delusion that you have time. They're too busy loving like there's no tomorrow, because for any of us, there might not be.

Chapter 6: More Years, Less Life?

"I have to be realistic. I know we're not here forever, so I try to just take one day at a time and enjoy it. Of course I ask God for a hundred and ten, a hundred and fifteen years. I might get there. I don't know what heaven is like, but I know that I like what I have down here. And I like the old statement, 'Heaven is my home, but I'm not homesick.' I want to stay here and enjoy life."

Chapter 7: The Lessons of Fred

"What do they say about the Timex watch?" he said. "It took a licking but it kept on ticking." It wasn't Joel Osteen, but it would do. "That's how I feel. I've taken some lickings but thank God I'm still ticking. Yes indeed."

Chapter 12: The Lessons of Jonas

(As) the year went along I found myself shifting my focus to the quiet beneath the noise - how unlikely the moment was, how each silver contained a gift that might never return. Maybe this was what it meant to think like an old person. I couldn't live wholly in the moment, because I had a future to think about, but if I had learned anything, it was to live as if this future were finite, and the present all the more wondrous as a result.

"My own end will come when it's ready to come, but I never think about that," he said. "You cannot protect yourself from death." All around him he saw people disengaged from the life they were given. "I grew up with no radio, no electricity, no television, no music, no phonographs. I saw my first movie when I was fourteen. One could live to two hundred. But yet I see some young people, twenty years old, and they seem to be bored already with life, and some of them cannot stand it. That's something else."

So often we measure the day by what we do with it - cure cancer or surf in Maui or meet with our child's math teacher - and overlook what is truly miraculous, which is the arrival of another day. Enjoy it or not. The day doesn't care, but if you miss it, it won't be back again.

Epilogue

"I think I am optimistic, because I see everything in a a longer time perspective," he said. "So okay, when all my friends are panicking about Trump, I see it as two steps forward, one step back, and that has always been - all the wise men, from Confucius as far as we know, thought that that's how humanity works. One step back may be pretty hard to take, but it's a normal thing. It'll come back again. The development of humanity can never be stopped."