Happiness and the entrepreneurial physician

Readers of my blog know that, when I tend to wax philosophical, one of my topics of great interest is Happiness. And I have been enormously impressed with the research and authorship of Sonja Lyubomirsky (The How of Happiness), also a prior teleclass guest expert of mine.

A post in her blog earlier this month, What If I’d Never Met My Husband? got me thinking about those paths almost not taken in my own life.

What if my dad hadn't suggested and then signed me up for medical school while I was living in Costa Rica for a year?

What if I hadn't been home the day the call came inviting me to move to Zimbabwe and work as a much-needed general practitioner in a coal-mining town and bush area?

What if I had chosen to visit Britain or Australia instead of the USA while I was waiting for a new family medicine training program to come to South Africa?

What if I hadn't seen a broken squash racket in my now-husband's office (a mutual love of the game, at the time) while I was doing a urology rotation during my family medicine residency?

What if the Internet-startup company I work for had succeeded wildly, instead of closing, and I hadn't had the down-time to thing long and hard about what I really wanted out of life?

What if I hadn't gone to dinner that night with two girlfriends who insisted that I wasn't too old to try and have a baby?

It really works - I feel deeply grateful and happy to be right where I am right now, surrounded by the right people in my life. It's no wonder one of my favorite yoga poses is Happy Baby!!

What about you?