Ray’s Daily
February 10, 2020
Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.
Omar Khayyam
OK, I have decided that I am not while going to waste my time on unhappiness. The years I have left are better spent enjoying life with my wife and friends. I know, you are right, it is not always easy to put unhappiness away when things get tough. But for myself I will continue to do my best to focus on what is right versus letting what is wrong take me down.
Today I am sharing an article that I have edited that offers tips on how to maximize our happiness.
Techniques For Greater Happiness
By John D. Moore, PhD
I’d like to share with you ten cognitive restructuring techniques designed to reduce your stress and generate greater happiness.
- Avoid the playing the blame game – It takes courage to recognize you are responsible for many challenges you meet. Even if someone’s mean, how you view circumstances is up to you. When you blame another person, you let them control your well-being. It’s far better to take charge of your destiny.
- Create new mental pictures for stressful events – Whatever you picture stays alive in your mind. If you can’t stop creating mental images of unwanted memories, play with what you see. Change them from color to black and white. Put a frame around them. Shrink them and add a silly cartoon character voice to lighten the mood and the pictures may fade.
- Recognize life lessons – Everyone must deal with problems. Happy people consider setbacks stepping-stones to their greatest achievements though. Without them, they wouldn’t discover what to do or increase resilience.
- Talk about what works – When you talk about difficulties often, you focus on negativity. Before you can feel better, you must alter your mood. So, leave unproductive exchanges with pals for times when they offer wise advice unless you want to stay unhappy.
- Know your problems won’t last – Bear this idea in mind when you face troubles and train yourself to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
- Encourage helpful conversations – Rather than strive to get friends to agree with you and strengthen your misery, ask them to help you recover. Seek wise counsel from people who offer fresh perspectives.
- Consider solutions – Never hang your hopes on one solution. If you think there’s only a single way to solve problems, you narrow your vision of what might be and miss opportunities to manage well.
- Understand you are not alone – However strange the problem you face, you’re not alone. If you don’t know how to cope, find out how other people deal with similar difficulties and learn from their mistakes and successes.
- Trust your inner voice – Many people who love to give advice will appear out of the blue if you talk about your problems. People might offer sensible counsel, but discount advice from individuals who insist you do as they say. Only you know what’s best for you.
- Let go when it’s time – If you are hanging on to a problem, recognize the time has come to let it go. When you forgive people who have caused pain in your life, you surrender negativity and regain your emotional freedom and get back to the business of living.
~~~
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.
Marcus Aurelius
~~~
An elderly woman and her little grandson, whose face was sprinkled with bright freckles, spent the day at the zoo. Lots of children were waiting in line to get their cheeks painted by a local artist who was decorating them with tiger paws.
“You’ve got so many freckles, there’s no place to paint!” a girl in the line said to the little fella. Embarrassed, the little boy dropped his head. His grandmother knelt down next to him “I love your freckles. When I was a little girl I always wanted freckles, she said, while tracing her finger across the child’s cheek. “Freckles are beautiful!”
The boy looked up, “Really?”
“Of course,” said the grandmother. “Why, just name me one thing that’s prettier than freckles.”
The little boy thought for a moment, peered intensely into his grandma’s face, and softly whispered, “Wrinkles.”
~~~
Some men break your heart in two,
Some men fawn and flatter,
Some men never look at you;
And that cleans up the matter.”
Dorothy Parker
~~~
He has a sure way to keep her from buying an outfit… When she tries it on, he says, “I love that middle-aged look it gives you.”
~~~
A very zealous soul-winning young preacher recently came upon a Farmer working in his field. Being concerned about the farmer’s soul the preacher asked the man, “Are you laboring in the vineyard of the Lord, my good man?” Not even looking at the preacher and continuing his work, the farmer replied, “Naw, these are soybeans.” “You don’t understand,” said the preacher. “Are you a Christian?” With the same amount of interest as his previous answer the farmer said, “Nope my name is Jones. You must be looking for Jim Christian. He lives a mile south of here.” The young determined preacher tried again asking the farmer, “Are you lost?” “Naw! I’ve lived here all my life,” answered the farmer.
“Are you prepared for the resurrection?” the fustrated preacher asked.
This caught the farmer’s attention and he asked, “When’s it gonna be?”
Thinking he had accomplished something the young Preacher replied, “It could be today, tomorrow, or the next day.” Taking a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiping his brow, the farmer remarked, “Well, don’t mention it to my wife. She don’t get out much and she’ll wanna go all three days.”
~~~
One half of all the troubles in the world can be traced to saying, “YES” too quickly and not saying, “NO” soon enough.
~~~
Tim was on his deathbed and gasped pitifully. “Give me one last request, Dear,” he said.
“Of course, Tim,” his wife said softly.
“Six months after I die, he said, “I want you to marry Lawrence.”
“But I thought you hated Lawrence,” she said.
With his last breath, Tim said, “I do!”
~~~
On a scale of 1 to 10, 4 is about a 7.
~~~
While meditating in the country, a poet noticed a farmer looking at him curiously. “Ah,” said the poet, “perhaps you, too, have seen the golden-red fingers of dawn speeding across the eastern sky, the red-stained sulfurous islets floating in a lake of wine in the West, the ragged clouds at midnight, blotting out the shuddering moon?” “No,” replied the farmer, “not lately. I’ve been on the wagon for more than a year.”
~~~
The road to success is marked with many tempting parking spaces.
~~~
*Laws of Parenting*
- The later you stay up, the earlier your child will wake up the next morning.
- For a child to become clean, something else must become dirty.
- Toys multiply to fill any space available.
- The longer it takes you to make a meal, the less your child will like it.
- Yours is always the only child who doesn’t behave.
- If the shoe fits…it’s expensive.
- The surest way to get something done is to tell a child not to do it.
- The gooier the food, the more likely it is to end up on the carpet.
- Backing the car out fo the driveway causes your child to have to go to the bathroom.
- If it’s advertised on tv, it’s a sure guarantee it better be under the Christmas tree.
~~~
My Dog Can Lick Anyone
~~~
Do you know your neighbors?
After living in our house for four years, we were moving out of state.
My husband had backed the truck up to our garage door so that we could start loading all of the boxes. Just then one of our neighbors came walking across the lawn carrying a plate full of muffins. “Isn’t that thoughtful,” my husband said to me. “They must have realized that we packed our kitchen stuff.” The neighbor stuck out his hand and boomed, “Welcome to the neighborhood!”
~~~
I must have told you a zillion times, don’t exaggerate!
~~~
“I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon and a cat that comes home late at night.”
Marie Corelli
~~~
Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.
Alice Walker
~~~
Ray Mitchell
Indianapolis, Indiana
Management is not responsible for duplicates from previous dailies. The editor is somewhat senile.
Ray’s Daily has been sent for more than fifteen years to people who want to start their day on an upbeat. If you have system overload because of our daily clutter, let me know and I will send you the information via mental telepathy. If you have not been getting our daily you can request to be added by e-mailing me at raykiwsp@gmail.com. Back issues are posted at http://rays-daily,com/ currently there are more than 2000 readers from around the world.
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