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Happiness Is a Choice You Make [Book]

    Happiness Is a Choice You Make by John Leland

    By: John Leland

    From this Book: 43 Quotes

    Book Overview:  In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise.  Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to “live better”―informed by those who have mastered the art.

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    Post(s) Inspired by this Book:

      “Old age is tremendously beautiful, and it should be so because the whole of life moves towards it.  It should be the peak.  How can the peak be in the beginning?  How can the peak be in the middle?  But if you think your childhood is your peak, as many people think, then of course your whole life will be a suffering because you have attained your peak – now everything will be a declining, coming down.  If you think young age is the peak, as many people think, then of course after thirty-five you will become sad, depressed, because every day you will be losing and losing and losing and gaining nothing.  The energy will be lost, you will weaken, diseases will enter into your being, and death will start knocking at the door.  The home will disappear, and the hospital will appear.  How can you be happy?  No, but in the East we have never thought that childhood or youth is the peak.  The peak waits for the very end.” ~ Osho, The Art of Living and Dying

        “Would you rather die peacefully among friends at age 50, or painfully and alone at age 80?” ~ Gregory Stock, The Book of Questions

          “What you loved as a child is less interesting to you now as an adult.  And what occupies your attention now will cease to sooner or later.  This growth is both natural and good.  We are designed to outgrow everything – including our desire to experience and improve the realms of money, sex, and intimacy.”

          David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man

            “When we reach sixty-two, we are likely to interpret feelings of exhaustion and boredom as the signal to retire.  But couldn’t they just as easily be the call to reinvent ourselves?  As we age it seems harder and harder to let our authentic dharma reinvent us.  We imagine somehow that the risks are greater.  We tend to think that leaping off cliffs is for the young.  But no.  Actually – when better to leap off cliffs?”

            Stephen Cope, The Great Work Of Your Life

              “People may call what happens at midlife ‘a crisis,’ but it’s not.  It’s an unraveling – a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you’re ‘supposed’ to live.  The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are.” ~ Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

                “Having an identity that is specifically linked to your age or how you look would definitely set you up for pain because these things will change. If we have a broader sense of who we are, our identity never becomes threatened.” ~ Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within

                  “The mediocre mind has no capacity for understanding. It is stuck somewhere near thirteen years in its mental age, or even below it. The person may be forty, fifty, seventy years old – that does not matter, that is the physical age. He has been growing old, but he has not been growing up. You should note the distinction. Growing old, every animal does. Growing up, only a few human beings manage.”

                  Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 177)

                    “The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever.” ~ Anatole France, Nobel Prize-Winning Novelist

                      “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking, don’t settle.” ~ Steve Jobs