“If you want to be happy, you have to be happy on purpose. When you wake up, you can’t see what kind of day you’ll have. You have to decide what kind of day you’ll create.”

I remember sitting at Gabe’s grade 8 graduation and the Principal was making a speech. He was telling the grads that they have certain rights (like we need to tell over entitled grade eights about what their “rights” are…)

Anyway. He was saying that they have a right to things like: security, roof over their heads etc. I can’t remember what else because he threw one “right” in there that just made me spin.

He told the kids that they had a “right to be happy.”

A “right to be happy.”

I was so unhappy that this is what he was teaching hundreds of our kids!

You don’t have a right to be happy! No one can hand you happiness on a silver platter. No can can give happiness to you. No one is responsible for your happiness.

Maybe you can say, you have a “right to choose to be happy.”

Because that is what happiness is. It’s a choice. It’s an active decision to choose to look at things a certain way, to act in a certain manner, to see things from a certain perspective.

I love in the quote it talks about “DECIDE what kind of day YOU’ll CREATE.” That gives us power. We have the power to choose how each day will be.

Of course we don’t always have the power to choose our circumstances, (although often our circumstances are results of accumulations of certain choices – tiny choices even – we have made along the way – but that’s another topic for another day…)…we have the power to choose how we react to those circumstances. And that, can help us to choose happiness.

I remember being in an elevator in Hawaii years ago and as I stepped out of it, I told the man who was riding in it with me (who I didn’t know but we had made some small talk) to “have a good day.”

He responded to me, “No, you make a good day.”

Always has stuck with me. Always something I choose to remind myself of when I’m feeling a little low. I can choose differently if I don’t like what I am getting out of life.

I do have the right to choose to be happy.