Imagine you are walking down a hallway with doors on either side of the hall. You are unsure why you are walking down what seems like this endless hall, but you keep walking something is compelling you to do so. Each door is labeled; finally you stop in front of the door labeled Happiness. Your face lights up, this is the door that you were looking for. Your smile quickly fades as you turn the knob and to find that it is locked, if only you had the key to unlock happiness.

Many of us search for the key to happiness; we look for it in our jobs, in our loved ones. We think that if we have enough money, status, friends, and material possessions that the key will appear…that we will be happy. We often fail to look in the one place, in fact the only place that the key to happiness is…within ourselves.

It is easy to think that it the key to happiness is a physical thing that you find by chance. It is harder to realize that we have control over our happiness. That everything else is just a happiness substitute. It might fulfill our search temporary, but unless we start looking inside ourselves, we will always be walking down that long hallway locked out of what we seek.

If we control our own happiness, then why are we not happy all the time? There are always going to be things to bring us down. Sometimes, it seems like we have gotten more than our fair share of disappointments, but even these pitfalls do not steal our happiness away…it just distracts us.

We need to open ourselves up to the fact that happiness is not depended on what goes on around us. It is our life, we have the choice whether to be happy or not. We have to take that inner journey to find our own key. The sooner that we start looking internally instead of externally, the sooner we will be able to unlock that door to happiness.

© Copyright 2006 Tonya Ramsey