Happiness and sadness

The one thing I look forward to in the Sunday morning papers, APART of course from the usual ditzy stuff in the lifestyle & entertainment pages, is Jim Paredes' column. He had a very nice piece yesterday, a very simple message which we've heard again and again in most articles about happiness. But for some reason, maybe because of the timing, it just hit home. With his permission, I would like to reproduce a few lines, just so I can come back to it again and again:

Happiness and sadness are simply states of being that, oddly enough, we choose to be in. But those who choose happiness choose it consciously, while lucid and awake. Those who choose sadness do so while asleep.
And there's the paradox. Man will always search for happiness as he has done since the beginning of time, even if the search, as immortalized in books and movies, like the search for God, is ultimately a lost cause. Why? Because you cannot find something that was never lost to start with. So stop searching. Instead, wake up to life as it is and see the grace in that, because therein lies deliverance.