Secret #5 and Summary

The final "Secret" is to give more than you receive. Giving makes you happier than taking, serving makes you happier than being served, helping makes you feel better than being helped. Not too complicated really is it? The author connected this with a sense of being part of something greater, being part of the great web of being, connecting to something beyond ourselves. I'm not sure this is necessarily true, and I'm not sure how it is connected to giving. I'm sure that feeling like there is something bigger than yourself that is intimately connected with yourself helps significantly in providing a sense of purpose, a sense that there is a reason for existence, that what you do matters. However, I think giving makes you happy because there is nothing more pleasant, more significant, more purposeful than to know that you can make other people happy.

Happiness is a socially transmitted virus. Just being around happy people makes you happy, and you being happy makes those around you happy. If anyone's been at a happy event they know that after a while pretty much everyone is happy even if there isn't anything to be particularly happy about. One of the greatest pleasures is simply to be present in a crowd of happy people.

What I have learned from this book is that there are not actually any secrets to happiness. You and I know what are the attitudes and behaviors of happy people. You and I know what we do that makes us happy to the extent that we can be happy, and what makes us tired and miserable and bored. The key is to find the way to transform our lives in such a way to bring about the situation we already know would make us happy. The last two chapters i this book address this point, and they do it in a marvelously simple way. Basically, we do what we think about. If we think about the things that make us happy we are far more likely to do those things. If we think about smiling to people, being generous, appreciating the beauty of what is around us, we are more likely to be people who smile, are generous, and appreciate things. That will make us more happy. If we worry, or have regrets, or tell ourselves we have failed, we are likely to be miserable. If we think about what is lacking we will notice what we lack. If we think about what we have we will be more appreciative of this.

Habits are the key to happiness. I think this might be the wisest thing I have learned from a book about wisdom, that happiness is a habit. To make something a habit you just need to keep focusing on something until you don't notice that you do it. An example in my life is that I used to dislike going grocery shopping, it was a chore. But I have learned to deliberately smile at everyone in the store. Not only does smiling make you feel good, it cheers up the other people at their chores and they smile back at you. Now after perhaps a year of this I find myself automatically smiling when I head into a grocery store. I have a similar response to doing the dishes, warm water and dish soap and an empty mind is really quite a nice combination. For me I will be better off the more of these habits that I develop over time.

The other thing that this book has given me is the opportunity to think about where I belong. Christina and I have moved to Houston, and to this point neither of us feel like we belong here. We aren't really suburban people, we are country or city people. We need a place that is organized around people rather than tasks, places where someone can walk with no particular purpose other than being alive. A place where things of interest appear rather than have to be studiously sought after. I need a place with friends, and friends with whom I can share a common purpose. I have really missed my band probably more than anything because not only were they my friends, but they were my friends with whom I shared a common goal, and that common goal made us happy and was a gift to others.