Ah, Ken Dodd. What a national treasure.
OK, I admit I’m not a huge fan, but some of you may remember it was that same buck-toothed Scouse comedian who took a song called Happiness into the charts in the 1960s (no, I wasn’t around then, either, but I know the song).
You remember it – “Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess...” etc etc, ad nauseam.
Now, I know it’s a rubbish song, but the thinking behind the lyrics is quite profound. Honest.

(Our Ken didn’t write it, by the way).
Listen to one of its verses (try to eliminate Ken Dodd’s voice from your head, if you can – it puts you off):
“Happiness is a field of grain,
Lifting its face to the falling rain.
I can see it in the sunshine, I breathe it in the rain.
Happiness everywhere.”
I believe this bears comparison with some of the greatest of history’s thinkers.
Here is 17th century poet John Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
And Victorian writer George Gissing: “I have the happiness of a passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?”
And German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings... The world in which a person lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he or she looks at it.”
In other words, happiness is not something you can get through outside forces, it is a state of mind.
And in that thought lies great liberation. For if we are the only ones who can create our own happiness, it means we’re in control of it.
Fear, pain, hurt, anxiety – all these can be lessened or even eliminated through the power of the mind. Just ask hypnotist Paul McKenna and his fellow Neuro Linguistic Programming bods.
Try this: Next time you feel sad, annoyed, rejected, betrayed, undervalued, frightened or any of a long list of negative feelings, stop for one second. Imagine those feelings are a large ball of stuff – it can be anything you can visualise; for me it’s a grey ball of foam – then imagine it shrinking in size. ‘Squeeze’ it with your mind until it’s the size of a tennis ball. Then put it in your pocket.
The feelings should go with it. You can get them out and examine them, if you want, but they can no longer overwhelm you.
And don’t forget to count your blessings. If you don’t live in a war zone, you’re not in physical pain, your family and friends are well and you have enough money to put food on your plate every day, you really have nothing to complain about.
You only get one life. Don’t do your best to make it a miserable one.

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