Getting to Happy

Sometimes you don't want to smile. Sometimes you just aren't feeling it, the muscles in your face stretched thin by the stress you faced during the week.
Smiling can be hard when inside you want to rage, inside you want to punch someone, inside you want to cry or yell or throw a lamp upside someone's head.
There are days when smiling is harder than it seems, when the force it takes to make the tips of your lips go up instead of down doesn't seem worth it.
I remember one day a couple of years ago I was walking in Borders (my favorite place in the world) when an older woman told me I should smile. Apparently, I wasn't grinning enough. I wanted to tell her to screw off.
Don't get self-righteous. I'm sure there's a long list of people you wanted to tell to screw off as well and were tempted to replace the word "screw" with a much more succinct and vulgar verb.
And truth is there are days when you will feel sad and you will get mad at the world. And on those days, you will want to either smack yourself for some dumb thing you did or smack someone else for their stupidity.
This is life and this is the way life is. Smiling when you don't feel the joy that brings the smile isn't worth it. You might as well just frown.
Being able to smile in the face of life's storms is about having something more than happiness, something more than a temporary feelilng.
Being able to smile is about having a foundation upon which you face difficulties. It's about having an outlook that says this isn't going to last. This feeling, this circumstance, is not permanent.
Smiling is only the outer manisfestation of the inner work you have to do, as Terry McMillan puts it, to get to happy. You have to see life as half full and not half empty. You have to see that the darkness surrounding you won't last because there is light; you just have to chip at the crap in your life that's keeping you from getting to that light.
You either live or you die. And dying doesn't have to mean literally. It could mean spiritually. Death could simply mean allowing your soul to perish because you decided that this life isn't worth it.
Again, you either live or you die, and it's a choice you make every day. You live when you push open the walls of your heart and love. You live when you control your reaction to whatever crap life puts in your path.
You live when you feel the pain enough to learn from it and let it go, knowing that whatever the next chapter in your life only begins when you turn the page.
Smiling is a life-long journey of finding your joy, that effervescent thing that makes you you, and smiling comes from walking in the confidence that this is the right path, this is the right moment, this is the right you.