“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,”  Bill Withers wrote, “It’s not warm when she’s away.”

The cadence and melody really rocks but the message is not so great.

Come on. Face the truth.

It might be flattering to be someone’s sunshine for a little while, but after a while it gets old.

· Carrying around someone else’s happiness like a sack of potatoes.

· Or slinging your own bag of sorrows into the arms of your loved ones and expect them to make you smile.

“I finally realized”, one of my kids told me after he had been away from home for a while, “that its nobody else’s job to make me happy. It’s something I have to choose every day.”

We can’t squeeze it out of family members or take by force from our friends.

Bottom line – Our happiness is not dictated by our circumstances as much as it is by our perspective. We can choose to enjoy what we have. Or, we can decide to focus of what we don’t have.

It’s up to each one of us. To be happy. To be content even when who or what we think we need is not around.