day 90- think happy, think chocolate

A lesson from Michael McLean:


Close your eyes and count slowly and silently from ONE to TEN.

Any problems? You don’t have to do this in a foreign language. Your native tongue is fine. Just get from 1 to 10 and open your eyes.

Great. Now the second part of this little exercise.

Wait. Before we go to part two, I need to know if you’re familiar with CHOCOLATE. Doesn’t matter which kind of chocolate: Swiss chocolate, dark chocolate, hot chocolate, chocolate ice cream, chocolate cake, chocolate candies, chocolate malted milkshakes. Anything that qualifies as that delicious brown sweet substance that actually forms one of the four major food groups in some people’s diets. If, for dietary reasons you’re unfamiliar with any or all things chocolate, you’re excused from this little test. Okay. We can move on.



Now, for the second part of this exercise, close your eyes and count slowly and silently from ONE to TEN only DON’T THINK ABOUT CHOCOLATE!!! If anything chocolate enters your mind at any time during your counting you have to stop and start over again, beginning at ONE.

You might want to think about something that’s NOT chocolate to keep your mind off chocolate, but this can be a tricky strategy because thinking about that OTHER THING simply reminds you that you’re only focusing on it because you’re not supposed to be thinking about the Chocolate this OTHER THING is meant to distract your from thinking about. Just don’t think about Chocolate. Stop it! If you can’t stop it before you start you’re NEVER going to make it from One to Ten without thinking about anything that melts in your mouth, not in your hands….Ignore that. If you have a marker, go ahead and scratch those lines out. Just don’t use a BROWN one.

Okay, begin.

Why is this taking you soooooo long? You did this effortlessly in Part 1. What happened?

The Official M2BJ Handbook would like to suggest what might have happened. In each case the goal was the same; to count from 1 to10. But when the focus was not on the goal, but on what we weren’t supposed to do while trying to reach that goal, everything became more difficult than it needed to be.

Life can do that to us. Distract us. Become the urgent, demanding, have-to- deal-with-right-now sequence of things that keeps us from CELEBRATING and REJOICING in the little miracles of happiness that are begging for our attention. Remember. Our MISSION is to be “willing to learn” how to celebrate and rejoice the ways we’ve been blessed and find happiness where we haven’t found it before.

Another thing that probably should be highlighted here before we move on is that bit about learning a new language. The language of JOY.

Those of us who are not natural linguists may be concerned about the foreign language required for this mission. Some of us aren’t familiar with the language of JOY while others THINK they know what it sounds like, but they’re wrong.

The language of JOY is not at all the same as what some might call

“happy-speak”. Happy-Speak is really a pseudo-language like pig-latin. It’s a made up way of communicating where someone can pretend the real tragedies and heart aches of the world can be minimized if they just say the correct happy-speak words to make it all okay. On a mission to be happy the REAL happiness we seek to rejoice and celebrate is not found in glossing over and denying the truths of life with our fingers plugged in our ears as we loudly sing, “la la la la la I’m Not Listening”. No, the language of JOY is nothing if not HONEST, tender and kind. The language of JOY is spoken in truth every single moment, with a faith that just because we don’t really understand why something impossibly difficult has happened to us, (or someone we love) pretending we understand when we don’t is a poor substitute for trusting the source of happiness to reveal the answers when we’re truly ready to receive them.

The reason it’s ultimately important to learn the language of JOY is not so much for the benefit of others, but for ourselves. If we can learn to think in this language there’s an excellent chance that we’ll be able to place language of joy descriptions in our hearts and minds of the “real deal” when it comes to happiness.