What should we do to acquire more simcha in life, more happiness in life?
ANSWER:
The only trouble is, I'd like to have five hours to talk on the subject. There are two very important ingredients to acquire simcha. One is to take care of your health. You have to go to sleep on time, eat on time, take care of your teeth, don't live a sedentary life. You have be active, walk, you must be active in order to keep up your blood and lymph circulation, you need many things to take care of your health.
The second and more important element is, you have to study the opportunities for happiness which are available in life. There is happiness galore everywhere waiting for us, only we are not capable of appreciating it when we never learned to think about it. If you'll take out time to develop your mind, you're going to gain one form of happiness after the other. I'll tell you a little incident that happened to me. I walked out of a side street onto Kings Highway, at that moment I heard a woman say to her friend that she just recovered from an eye operation. Now that woman didn't realize what she did for me; it's a long time since then, but almost every day I think about that. An eye operation is no fun at all, and if you never had an eye operation, you have a cause to be happy. Happy? Yes! Enjoy the fact you don't have trouble with your eyes, more than a pair of glasses at most.
Now it may appear silly, but it pays to be silly in the pursuit of happiness. Learn how to enjoy the fact that you have good eyes, you never had an operation on your eyes. Also learn how to be happy in the fact that you have two kidneys; very many people don't even have one. Next time when you come out of the bathroom, thank Hakadosh Baruch Hu. Anytime a person is able to go to the bathroom and function properly, he should feel a great happiness, a person that has no kidneys can never urinate. Now this I understand cannot be explained in a few words, - if you want to learn how to be happy, it's a science. You have to practice, you have to study, you have to think, and little by little it grows upon you and life becomes full of joy and you become a wealthy man. Eizehu oshir, who is a wealthy man? Ha'someiach bechelko, one who learns to enjoy what he has, and we have very much.
Good Shabbos To All
This is transcribed from questions that were posed to Harav Miller by the audience at the Thursday night lectures.
To listen to the audio of this Q & A please dial: 201-676-3210
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