Cheerful in All Situations

This title is actually a bit of a misnomer, because I have not found it possible to be "cheerful" all the time. I remember reading some article years ago, perhaps in William James's writings, where he talks about the idea that one smiles first before one is happy, as a way of prompting feelings of happiness. But when I talk about "cheerful", I am referring more to an attitude than to an emotion, and therefore not dependent on emotions at all.
   Cheerfulness, to me, is a kind of decision not to allow the troubles of life to affect one's sovereignty over their emotional life. It often means being selective and discerning about where one would like to devote one's overall energies in a given situation.This is a delicate balance for me. At work, for example, I will be anxious if I am overwhelmed by many tasks, and in that sense, the tasks do influence my emotional life. But if I choose to take the tasks in a cheerful way, I am no longer bound by certain ideas or thoughts that make me a kind of prisoner to those tasks. To give another example I heard of that I am quite fond of quoting: Alan Watts gave the example in a cassette tape I had listened to many years ago, about how, even in the midst of a pile of dishes, one is really only responsible for one dish at a time. A cheerless person will look at the whole pile of dishes in front of her or him and lose their entire "appetite" to wash dishes. They thus become governed by the appearance of "so many dishes to clean". On the other hand, a cheerful person has this ability to curtail the obvious, and even to train their mind so that they are not jumping to the overwhelming conclusion or thought that all these "things" need to be handled all at once. Ironically, then, being cheerful involves a certain selective ability to see, rather than taking in the entire picture. It requires a kind of active approach to curtailing the way one sees things so that they are not starkly overwhelming or daunting.
   I apply this principle now to a course syllabus I am reviewing about "Identity and the Literary Text". Here, I start to get bogged down by the assignment requirement which asks me to write down five key areas of my identity. "Wow, identity: that is such a huge topic", I realistically assess. However, I then unrealistically conclude that because the syllabus assignment requires me to discuss this topic, I am somehow required to write everything about it. Rather than seeing the assignment as a potentially exploratory or evocative one where I have artistic license to select the areas I want to discuss and reflect on, I think this assignment asks me to define who I am...which is subject to continuous change in most cases! Now isn't that something? In fact, the task of defining one's true self is not something that most people can reasonably do in six weeks, which thus leads me to wonder if perhaps I have missed the point of the assignment or might need to adjust my expectations about how I will approach the requirements of the assignment.