Review of Finding your Power to Be Happy by D. E. Hardesty

Is it better to be conditionally or unconditionally happy? This is the question that arises from reading the book titled "Finding Your Power to Be Happy" by D.E. Hardesty. The author is a seventy year sage man who has to have lived several important life experiences to write the interesting inspirational book I have reviewed in this article. This kind of book, furthermore, is included in the self – improvement category, a literary genre dedicated to improve ourselves and our entire life. Why is “Finding Your Power” more interesting than other inspirational books? Meanwhile, because I had the chance to read this book before reading similar others. This work is focused on how to find unconditional happiness and live a peaceful and quiet existence. Nowadays, human beings are forced to live a very stressful life, full of troubles and concerns that risk to damage the mind and body. To get rid all this (needless) suffering, the author suggests to find unconditional happiness instead of conditional happiness. But which is the difference between these two kinds of happiness? The author explains this difference in a very clear manner. Conditional happiness comes from what we do or have, while unconditional happiness arrives alone and without any valid reason. The author, hence, wants to persuade us that it is possible to be happy also when it would be impossible being in such a way. To drive your opinion to the one of himself, the author uses very persuasive concepts and examples, such as children’s behavior. Like children, indeed, the adult human beings can be happy immediately as soon as they get what they want or seek in their lives, but after a while, they forget this kind of happiness and return to the usual condition of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. This behavior can be understood by studying the mind functioning. The human mind is, indeed, adaptive, namely it keeps us in a steady state of concern and anxiety in order to protect us from perils, damages and other risks. But this natural stimulus of mind was normal in the prehistoric age, but not today, in our modern time, because there are other methods to save and protect us from danger. Unfortunately, during the human evolution, our mind has been used to keep its bad habitude to produce only negative thoughts. It is, hence, necessary to train our mind to set free from negative thoughts and focus only on the positive ones. This kind of training is called “ mindfulness”. Mindfulness has to be learned and for this purpose the book teaches how to learn this state of deliverance of our mind. Through a fluent style of writing and clear concepts and examples, the author teaches some important techniques of meditation and let us know how some beliefs and philosophies considered the same concept of happiness. Yoga practices and concepts of Buddhism fill better what the author explains during his long discussion about unconditional happiness. Very, very interesting it is also the example reported by the author about a prisoner of Nazi concentration camps. During this horror, many people committed suicide, this prisoner, instead, to continue his life despite all this tragedy, learned to focus his mind on positive thoughts and on the belief that soon or later this unhappy condition would end. “Life is absurd – the author writes - the universe is absurd and human beings have only two options: suicide or acceptance”. To not give up living, we must be aware that in life, every moment, soon or later, ends. This apparently rough and harsh concept is necessary to drive us to find real happiness inside ourselves and not outside. I hope that when you finish reading this book, you’ll learn to keep calm in every condition. It is hard to do, I know, but with this book, you will surely have an enjoyable journey into the human mind and the way to find real, eternal and unconditional happiness.