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Happiness Is The Result Of Happiness

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Happiness is the result of luck, at least according to the people who invented the word way back when. The word itself is rooted in luck; Darrin M. McMahon, Ph.D., a professor of history at Dartmouth College, says that“... in every Indo-European language, without exception… the word happiness is a cognate with the word luck.” Or, as a monk in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales put it, “... the wheel of fortune controls our happenstance, and hence our happiness.” He was not talking about the Wheel of Fortune that’s on at 6:00 pm every night where people spin a giant gaudy wheel and solve word puzzles to win money. No, he meant the omniscient wheel of fortune that controls every aspect of everyone’s life. While the wheel of fortune spun freely in some parts of the world, the road to happiness was included more resistance in other parts. Schools of Classical thought- famous philosophers with weird names like Plato and Socrates should come to mind - believed happiness was earned. Not only did they believe happiness was earned, they believed that to achieve it, you had to go the extra mile (or 10 miles) with moral behavior. But once you had moral behavior, by gosh your life could be going to hell in a handbasket and you’d still be happy. Today, in modern America, happiness is something that is worked for. Complete your goals and happiness shall be yours. You may have to fall in a couple of ditches and break some bones along the way, metaphorically and literally, but happiness is

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