Happiness Is Intentional!

“Happiness is intentional and it serves us best when we use it to serve others. Share a genuine smile and you bestow an undeniable gift to others.”

By Lionel Ketchian

Happiness happens when you intend it to happen. Happiness is an intention; you create happiness by causing it to happen within your experience.

For many years I have been teaching and explaining how to find happiness and use it for your own benefit and the benefit of others. Let me share my experience of happiness and the meaning and purpose it has given me in my life with you.

I have lived with happiness for over 25 years and the benefits to me personally have been profound. A few years ago, I begun to become aware that living with happiness has also revealed some life long lessons for me. I have been feeling more connected to people I meet and have any kind of communication with. I have felt a sense of family arising from this connection.

We live in a wonderful community here in Fairfield, Connecticut. For me the community is a sense of an extended family. This is not because I want or need more family, it is because that is the feeling I have about the people I encounter. When I allow myself to express my feelings about a greater feeling of family, I realize that my life has expanded in an infinite dimension.

I care about people and I regard them as brothers and sisters and close relatives in our one big beautiful human family.

I thought I would express this gratitude I have for the people in my life, which includes many of you. As I find more people benefiting from being happy, I enlarge my own happiness. Your happiness becomes my happiness.

Each encounter has been so positive that it adds to my experience of life. Another benefit I have discovered to being happy is the interconnectedness I have found in my happiness relationships, no matter how brief the communication. All connections, even a simple e-mail, are real and lasting ones that have enduring substance when you feel this way.

I have felt a wonderful feeling of finding my purpose in life. That purpose basically is to serve others. Not to serve others what they want, but to serve them what I can serve them best. We can only give away what we have. Some of us have money and are generous and benefit others with our donations.

All of us have something we are good at and it is usually something we love. You can always give some of what you love or have to others. What you love, you have in abundance. The real reason for serving others is that when you give part of yourself you gain so much more of yourself. You gain the freedom and exhilaration from the meaning and purpose you bring into your life. So give you gift to others and see how much better your life becomes!

Just to have a small positive effect in someone’s life has been a source of tremendous fulfillment and meaning. In showing others ways to happiness and enriching their lives, I have found authentic purpose and thereby real meaning in my life. I have felt a real sense of purpose in life that my feelings of family have given me. This may not make a lot of sense to some people.

I am writing this for those who understand the heart of this matter. This is about living in a world of inner peace and unconditional love and happiness, whose rewards are in the present moment for the individual who is serving others. If you have not served others with an open happy heart, it would be impossible to understand the feelings I am expressing to you now.

I have found that individuals are good, especially as they become happy. If you seek to do good and even if you do good in your life, you will not be able to sustain it without being happy. At the very least you will not enjoy it or benefit from it yourself. Let me make a bold and outrageous statement for you. Begin thinking of the world as your family. Look at people with the thought that you are connected to them in some way.

They have dreams like you, feel like you and want to be happy just like you do. If you do this you will create a changed world to live in for yourself that will support you.

Happiness is intentional and it serves us best when we use it to serve others. Share a genuine smile and you bestow an undeniable gift to others. Share some of your time, a kind word, provide a gentle thought or express sincere praise and you have made a contribution in someone’s life that may be more meaningful and important to them then you will ever know.

To quote the great words of Albert Schweitzer, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”

Wishing you a very Happy, Healthy and Meaningful life for this New Year!

I Love You,

Lionel