Everyone’s out there chasing Mr. Smiley. But “happiness must happen,” wrote Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, “and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”
The quest for happiness produces the exact opposite of its intention: unhappiness. Keep swimming in the sea of joy, and we’ll cease to be so. The extra effort makes one miserable.
We try too hard to be happy when everything we want is on the other side of fear. What we want is to be more vulnerable. Everything in life that matters requires risk.
Dancing with the unknown and thinking unhappy thoughts is at the heart of finding satisfaction.
The storm never ends, the faster we accept that, the quicker we can land contentment which is happy just being itself.