One of life’s most troublesome lies is that things will be better when we get to a certain point we haven’t reached yet. We tell ourselves that life will be complete when the mortgage is paid off, when the kids leave home, when we make that sea change or take that extended trip around Australia. But of course we’ve been doing that all our lives. There was a time when we couldn’t wait to go to school, then to leave school: to get a job, then to retire; to get married, and then to get out of the marriage. It always seems that happiness is forever over the next hill, but when we get there we find it has moved somewhere else.
You’d think by now most of us would have learned that happiness is not a destination, it’s actually a journey; and the secret to finding it is to practice the discipline of counting our blessings.