Would You Rather Be Happy Or Right?

Let go of the need to be right and discover the transformative power of accepting life on its own terms. The choice is yours.

Issue #18:

Good day and welcome back to The Zen Journal. I want to talk to you today about something simple, yet profoundly important: the choice we make every day. We can choose to be happy, or we can choose to be right. But the truth is, we can rarely be both at the same time.

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Every morning when we wake up, we’re presented with two forces: doubt and faith.

Doubt is dark and heavy. It’s that nagging voice that tells us ‘what if…’, that list of ‘yeah… but’s and ‘you don’t understand’.

It’s endless, and it’s exhausting. It doesn’t take us anywhere. In fact, it probably just makes us sick.

I mean, who hasn’t felt that weight of frustration, resentment, and confusion? That’s doubt for you. It’s persistent, but it goes nowhere.

On the other side, we have faith. Faith in what, you ask?

Faith that we weren’t put on this earth to live in conflict with the people around us.

Faith that there’s another way to live, a way that doesn’t constantly involve fighting and resisting.

Faith that there’s something more than the stress and drama that often fills our lives.

Humility isn’t about thinking less of ourselves, it’s about thinking of ourselves less.

We need to bend ourselves to service, not the other way around. The world isn’t designed to cater to our every need.

We weren’t put here to demand that everyone else tailor their lives around us.

If we think that way, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.

And here’s the thing, we all have a choice. We can choose to focus on what we’re owed, what we deserve, and how unfair life is. We can stand there rubbing our hands, complaining that we haven’t gotten what’s rightfully ours, that life hasn’t given us the arc we think we deserve.

Or we can shift our perspective. We can choose to be grateful for what we have, to accept life on its own terms.

The more we cling to our delusions, our obsessions, our ideas of entitlement, the more we create a situation that’s not going to improve until we change our attitude.

We have a choice, and here it is: we can either be right, or we can be happy.

If we decide to argue, to fight, to stand our ground in a way that brings conflict into our lives, then we’ve already made our choice.

But if we want to live in peace, we need to let go of needing to be right all the time.

We either surf the waves of life, or we fight against them.

If we choose to fight, we can’t be upset when the world fights back.

It’s just how it works.

So, today, I challenge you to choose differently. Choose humility. Choose faith. Choose gratitude.

Life is going to unfold with or without us, but how we choose to respond is what makes all the difference.

I look forward to continuing this journey with you. Please feel free to share your thoughts, reflections, or questions as I dive deeper into these teachings.

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