My Personal Pursuit of Happiness

Yesterday I took Rachel for a 2 month check up with the eye doctor after her cataract surgery. Last Thursday morning I woke up and saw Rachel walking around the house with her "Stevie Wonder" style dark wrap around sunglasses on her face.

I said, "Rachel, are you OK?"

She proceeded to tell me that she can't see well out of her left eye. The 2nd eye that was operated on about 6 weeks ago. I believe it was a sudden loss of vision. The doctor kept asking her, "did this happen all of a sudden?" her reply, "well, No. I noticed it the other day when I closed one eye watching TV and I couldn't see the TV well."

With the elderly, especially my mother-in-law you can never be right until she decides that you are right, regardless of the actual facts which substantiate your claims.

The doctor was puzzled. He had pictures taken of her retina because he suspected she had a mini-TIA which could cause an obstruction in the blood vessels in around the optic nerve. He told us that the retina is brain tissue. Immediately I thought of the suspected aneurysm that Rachel was told to have checked out 3 years ago but chose not to. Her reasoning? She believes that if she has an aneurysm that at her age, 85, it's too late to do anything. She wants it to kill her in her sleep.

I've tried to explain to her that if it kills her, she'll be lucky. The aneurysm could case her to become a vegetable and end up in a nursing home. Her reply, "I don't want any life support whatsoever. You just let me die." She says that now.

Then she said, "Everyone is afraid to die." I said, "Well, not everyone." Rachel said, "I was taught that we are all going to hell when we die. No wonder I'm afraid to die."

I said, "What I believe is that we are living in hell right now. It's our choice to either make the best of it or focus on the bad things that happened to us in our lives."

Rachel: "I had a bad childhood. It wasn't fair. Why do some people have everything and others like me, have nothing."

Me: "You have a choice, we all have a choice to either focus on the good or the bad. We create our own happiness through the thoughts that we have. I've come to understand that the thoughts that I have today, create my reality for tomorrow. I have learned to forgive people and just let it all go. The reason is because holding onto the negative doesn't serve me well. It doesn't contribute to my ultimate goal of personal happiness."

I went on to tell her that through forgiveness we gain personal power, it lifts up our souls and helps us to understand the Universal Laws that are provided in order to help us achieve our individual enlightenment.

Continuing, I explained to her my philosophy about why we are here and why some people seem to be clouded with misfortune and others seem to be wealthy in all ways.

I believe that before we even are born we pick our families and friends. It's all mapped out with lots of potentials. Each potential path that we chose brings us to different situations in life. We have free will which allows us to make choices. It's all about our choices in life. We chose to hate, we chose to love. It's pretty cut and dry.

Each action that we do brings us along a new path with more choices. Our families that we chose before we incarnated together have karmic ties of some type. It was up to each of us to see the awesomeness of the Universe in each other in order to help us with those choices that inevitably would come along in our lives.

People all have different perceptions about life and the interactions that they have. Those who seem unhappy never hold the mirror up to their own faces, instead they turn the mirror and look for someone or something to blame. It was never their personal choice of how they chose to perceive what was happening around them.

Rachel definitely didn't believe in my philosophy. Immediately she discredited it and told me again how mad she was with her parents for being so mean to her.

That's when I said, "You know, we all have choices in life. We can either chose to be happy or unhappy. For me, I chose happiness and do everything that I can to ensure my personal happiness because I know that when I'm happy, everyone around me is happy. Why not chose happiness? Forgive and forget. Heck, I forgive Maryann for all that she's done, who am I to judge? Everything in life happens for a very good reason, it's something that we created in order to help us create our personal heaven on Earth.

Who knows if Rachel heard me. I told her that forgiveness is the key to personal happiness.