For most of my life, I have heard people talk about happiness as though it were a destination.
One day, they say, I will be happy.
When I retire.
When I have enough money.
When I lose some weight.
When my health improves.
When the children are settled.
When I travel.
When I finally have time.
There always seems to be something between us and happiness.
So we wait.
And wait.
And wait.
The problem is that happiness doesn't seem to live where we
think it does.
I have spent enough time walking through forests to understand
that the forest doesn't have a destination.
A tree doesn't wake up in the morning thinking, "If I can
just become a bigger tree, I'll finally be happy."
It simply grows.
It reaches.
It responds to sunlight and rain.
It bends in the wind.
It loses branches.
It grows new ones.
It lives.
Perhaps we could learn something from that.
We often think happiness means getting everything we want.
But the older I get, the less convincing that idea becomes.
Some of the happiest moments in my life have been surprisingly
ordinary.
A good conversation.
A walk.
A cup of coffee.
A laugh shared with someone I love.
A book I couldn't put down.
A song that suddenly took me somewhere I hadn't been for years.
A morning when nothing particularly important happened and yet
everything felt right.
Happiness often arrives quietly.
It doesn't always knock on the door.
Sometimes it slips in through a crack.
The trouble is, we are often too busy looking for the big
version of happiness to notice the small version sitting beside us.
We want the extraordinary.
Life keeps offering us the ordinary.
And sometimes the ordinary is extraordinary enough.
There is another lesson the forest teaches.
Nothing stays the same.
The beautiful summer afternoon becomes autumn.
The leaves fall.
Winter arrives.
Then spring.
If happiness depended on everything remaining pleasant, we would
spend much of our lives unhappy.
But perhaps happiness is not the absence of difficulty.
Perhaps it is the ability to remain open to life while
difficulty is present.
That doesn't mean pretending everything is fine.
It isn't.
Life can be painful.
People we love become ill.
Friends die.
Plans collapse.
Our bodies betray us.
Dreams change.
There are days when happiness is simply not available.
And we don't need to manufacture it.
But even in difficult seasons, there can be moments of grace.
A kind word.
A beautiful sky.
A friend who shows up.
A song.
A memory.
A laugh that catches us by surprise.
The trick may be learning to notice them.
I have come to believe that happiness has less to do with
possession and more to do with participation.
You don't have to own the forest to enjoy walking through it.
You don't have to own a song to be moved by it.
You don't have to possess a moment to be grateful for it.
And you don't have to understand life completely to love being
alive.
That last one may be the hardest.
We want answers.
We want certainty.
We want to know where everything is going.
But perhaps the essence of happiness begins when we accept that
we don't know.
There I am again, walking through the forest, looking for some
grand answer.
And eventually I realize I have missed the point.
The answer isn't waiting somewhere ahead.
It is happening around me.
The trees.
The wind.
The light.
The sound of my own footsteps.
The person I love.
The life I have been given.
For a moment, I stop trying to understand it.
I simply stand there.
And I get it.
Of course, the moment I get it, I want to keep it.
I want to put it in a bottle.
I want to take it home.
I want to make sure tomorrow feels exactly like today.
But I can't.
The wind moves.
The light changes.
The moment passes.
And I let it go.
Maybe that is happiness.
Not holding on to life.
But being awake enough to experience it while it is here.
We are all part of the same great unfolding mystery.
We always have been.
And perhaps the happiest thing we can do is stop standing
outside it, waiting for life to begin.
Step inside.
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