Happiness Challenge

I am freezing. We have reached the time of year when it is almost always unbearably cold in the house (or in the library, where I happen to be at the moment and they still have the air conditioning on!). It is the time when we staunch New Englanders will NOT turn on the heat, until at least October 1st. On September 30th, we can be sitting at our computer with wool socks and fleece jackets on, and the VERY NEXT DAY be lolling about the house in our tank tops, sweating,the heat turned up to 85, so we can make it up to ourselves for freezing our butts the past two weeks. It makes no sense. But every year it's the same.
I love the warmth, the sun. I do not do well when it gets frosty at night and downright hot by noon. I get sick, sometimes to the point I can't force myself out of bed. Then I get cranky, anxious, and very unhappy. I tend to not be able to stop the racing thoughts of betrayals and wrongs and misery of the past. I myself am not a paragon of peaceful, calm happiness. You'll have to look to the Dalai Lama for that. (As an aside, a friend of mine mentioned that she is sick of all the Dalai Lama junk mail she recieves. I keep meaning to ask what that means. I think I would LIKE Dalai Lama junk mail. Just seeing his calm smiling face makes me happy, at least for a moment.)
In any case, I am not always happy and laughing, hand-feeding squirrels as in the photo at the right. I am sad. I am sometimes miserable. I am, in other words, a mere mortal. Especially in the autumn in New England. I do not even enjoy the foliage (or foilage, as some of us say), unless it comes quite late, and I am well past my foggy exhaustion.
Another friend e-mailed me and said how sad she was, because of recent difficult events in her life. She is one of the most loving people I know, and she was questioning whether love was enough. So it can strike anyone, at any time. Illness, sadness, depression, loneliness. And sometimes it's difficult to even try to be happy, or to find a reason to do so. My response to this, to other people but most often to myself, is that we DESERVE to be happy. As human beings, we just plain deserve it. It's fine to remember to be grateful, but I think we must also recognise what we deserve. And it does no good to think of the past wrongs we've done or had done to us. They don't make us any less deserving of happiness right now, from this moment on. Our wrongs won't change the world from this point on, but our happiness might.
So with that in mind, try with me to think grateful and deserving and happy. Try to see the blue sky and the turning trees and your neighbor's face as beautiful, and a gift to you. Try at least, first, to just see them in their beauty. To write and draw them. Then you've done something to deserve them. If you need an excuse, there it is.