What to Do When Others Aren’t Happy
And how to preserve your own happiness
You wake up feeling super happy. You meet a friend for breakfast who shows up super grouchy.
Dang.
What do you do?
Let us start with what not to do:
1) Do not immediately try to make them feel better (see this article, or this one).
2) Do not minimize your own happiness out of guilt.
And flip that around to the positive:
1) Try to accept and love them exactly in the state they are in.
2) Trust your own experience and stand confidently in it.
Trusting your experience is a way of accepting and loving yourself exactly as you are, even if you want the other person to change, even if you want yourself to change to match them. So we could distill this further and say: Love what is. Or, as A Course in Miracles says, “Teach only love, for that is what you are.”
One important reminder for this is that you can love and accept what is without needing to act upon it. You do not need to change their grouch, and you do not need to change your happiness. From there, you simply* communicate openly and honestly and trust the flow of the morning.
*simple, but not always easy