What is your last memory of being really happy? Joyful? Laughing until your stomach hurt?
My guess is it had nothing to do with possessions.
It may have been a family celebration. A graduation. A healthy diagnosis. Some good news after an accident. Watching your loved one shine.
If we are waiting to be happy until we pay off the house or meet the right person or get a better job or lose ten pounds, we will be waiting for a very long time.
As novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne once said, “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
The happiness has always been with us. It’s there in the darkness and sadness and mundane days. It’s there when everything is crumbling down around us. We just have to switch our perspective and look through a gratitude lens. Remember what we do have. Cherish all that we should be thankful for.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell said, “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
The life that is waiting for us is the one that will make us happy. If we let it. The only person who can let that happiness in is the one looking back from the mirror.