Who said 'people are just as happy as they make their minds up to be?'
Abraham Lincoln! Its the single most important sentence and 'lifeline' that anyone has said that has changed my life significantly for the better. Here's a little story around this lifeline.
I moved to the USA as soon as I graduated from uni. and worked my 4th summer in a row selling aerial photography for a company called Airpic. This time, to communities in Pittsburgh. I then went travelling around the USA. While travelling across the USA, I often asked people where the best and finest place was to live in the USA. Some said Denver, others thought New York, many favored San Francisco and San Diego, and the concensus was that Los Angeles was dangerous, stay clear. Still, L.A. had its lure. Coming from a fishing town in the U.K., I'd never seen a movie star in person before.
So I headed to L.A. I'd bought an R.V. for $2000. A very low sum for even a fixer upper RV, I thought. Little did I know, this particular RV had a Chevy engine that was prone to warping, forcing the exhaust gasket to blow every 500 miles. Noxious fumes would leak into the cabin. I'd drive with the window down until I could find a suitable auto repairs supplier, park up and spend a few hours trying to fix the exhaust gasket once and for all. I was never successful. Every 500 miles, more noxious fumes and another repair job. All the way across the U.S.A. Still, the scenery was great and the vagabond adventuring was first rate.
I landed my RV in Malibu Beach, nestled it in among the other RV's parked up in front of the million dollar homes on the beach, and quietly lived there for three weeks. I'd welded a motorcycle rack to the back of the RV in West Virginia, and also got a great deal on a nice knobbly-tired off-road but road-legal motorbike. That was my escape pod from the RV, and I used it to tour all around Santa Monica, down to Orange County and in to Anaheim and beyond. But the RV didn't have a generator, and living by candlelight was getting old so I decided to rent a room, and get a job.
I worked as a Ford dealership car salesman for a short red-haired former toy salesman from England who took pity on me. The room was more interesting. I lived in a house with a Vietnam vet and his Vietnamese wife and four children. The oldest daughter, a 14 year old, had just had serious brain surgery and had a tumor removed. She took a liking to me. Until I brought my girlfriend home for a visit. Then she treated me with thorough scorn and hissing resentment. The kind of scorn that only a half-out-of-her-wits 14 year old who had just survived brain surgery could. But still I stuck around. I had a prozac popping girlfriend who was going through her dark stage. She showed me around town, for a few months. She showed me the dark side. I showed her the lighter side. Fast forward.
I then spent my 5th summer doing to door to door sales work for Airpic. The prior four summers I'd worked hard to raise enough cash to pay my own way through school. I was the company's top salesman, and had insisted on coming back each year for more punishment. I actually enjoyed it. I was the guy nobody could quite figure out. I wasn't especially smart or good looking, but I sold more aerial photos than anybody. I was fast. I ran from door to door. I turned the whole thing into a memory game. I'd memorise as many names, and stories about the community as I could and then use that to bring the community photos to life. I tried to entertain people, and they enjoyed it and didn't say 'no' too much.
But in my 5th summer working in the USA, I had a few setbacks. My sales teams and I were based in Lansing, Michigan. We rented a nice furnished house, and I took the room with the waterbed. Nice! A waterbed! But, noone told me that you're actually supposed to turn the heater on on a waterbed, even in the summer. One morning I woke up shuddering from the cumulative effect of sleeping on the bed for a couple of weeks. The water was colder than my body temperature and had slowly sapped the heat right out of me. Then I looked around and realised that the waterbed had turned into a moat. It had a slow leak and the water finally brimmed up to the top of the sides of the bed.
I developed a cough. I continued to work. It got worse. But I had some sales competitions in hand. I continued, won a mountain bike, then won my dream camera, then the cough got interminably worse and I had to take a day off. Then another day, to see the doctor, who told me that I had walking pnemonia. Then I took a test and lo and behold, I had dormant TB. No more work, no more competitions, I had to quit and recover. I was at an all time low. I'd quit, left my team behind, and drove back to California with my tail between my legs.
It was around this time that I was introduced to the phrase, "people are just as happy as they make their minds up to be." I remember when I heard it for the first time. It was as if someone had smacked me across the face. It was one of my first true points of realization. I NEVER looked back after hearing those words.
Happiness, quite simply, is a decision you make. Lincolns gift to America was unification, and freeing the slaves. His gift to me was happiness. Thank you Abe Lincoln.
