Happiness and Sadness

Are happiness/sadness simply states of mind? Or something more?
The potential for happiness and sadness lies in you and the people around you. But euphoric feelings of Happiness and the gloomy of Sadness are under a person's complete control. Sometimes we cannot help what we feel, yet feeling is mostly thought in the physical form. And we can manipulate our thoughts.

When feeling unhappy most people do not look at the source, they only seek a cure for it. And when the source is scrutinized, the remedies obtained are in the form of outside influence, such as drugs, therapy, pseudo-art. All these to distract from actually confronting the feeling, in your mind, and obliterating it with thought.

This is not to say that you can simply rid yourself of grief as soon as you forcefully think to yourself happy thoughts. Simply that if you objectively analyze your thoughts and feelings, you will come to the realization that all sadness is self-centered and it should not be given so much consideration, for the sake of altruism. The feeling itself is the physical reminder that something is amiss, could be anything. And it is contagious. From the tone of a person to the way their eyebrows are perched above their eyes, one can easily tell is a person is sad or happy, and true to ourselves, we pity them and share in their pain or rejoice in their ecstasy, because it is only human.

These feelings can all be controlled by the mind. If you feel sad, you can literally think your way to happiness. If you were so inclined and able. Of course not everyone can muster enough will power to bring themselves up, and so we look to the outside for help, doing things we enjoy helps a lot, but we must watch that the things we enjoy do not adversely affect us.

Why is it that happy people, you know the ones, that always have a smile on their faces and are constantly in a cheery mood, why is it that these people are so contagious themselves. They light up any room they enter merely with their presence, other people around them being to smile. We have not really been able to explain the contagion of these two most basic feelings further than the human need to relate, yet it is present nonetheless.

The mind's power to perceive extremely subtle details is relatively unrestricted, especially in other human beings. Why do we turn sad when we speak with a sad person, and smile when we listen to a cheerful person. Is it the need to belong? The need to somehow have a deeper connection to the people around us? Or does the rabbit hole go deeper? Are there empathic ways that we project and perceive these feelings? These are questions that will undoubtedly be answered, in time.

In the end, Happiness and Sadness are but words, to describe a state of mind. But the factors influencing these feelings are under our control, and if only we were better educated on the subject, we could control our feeling more appropriately. Until then my friends, cry as you may, laugh as you will, but always remember, your mind is like a ship, with you at the helm.