I find myself planning and working for the future, for payoffs and rewards in a month or a year, for which I am willing to pay with happiness now.\u00c2\u00a0 Only to find of course that there is always another month, another year to wait.\u00c2\u00a0 True, the future must be planned for, and there are surely rewards tomorrow for prudent action today.\u00c2\u00a0 But somehow, I am learning, I must discover how to live a life of happiness today.\u00c2\u00a0 Not someday when things quiet down and there’s enough in the bank and I’ve gotten beyond these problems — but today.\u00c2\u00a0 The idea that we can live temporarily unhappy lives in pursuit of payday\/someday, when we will be set for life and ready for happiness, is a sad illusion.<\/p>\n
Life is of a piece.\u00c2\u00a0 The future is woven of the thread we spin today.\u00c2\u00a0 It is silly to imagine that a “temporary” life of tension and stress is preparing us for a future day of relaxation and peace; that a provisional life spent compromising our ideals and deferring our deepest longings will one day give way to a future of fulfillment and deep joy.\u00c2\u00a0 It doesn’t work.\u00c2\u00a0 “What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t live a soul-ebbing life and somehow pull out happiness in the end.<\/p>\n
In a culture of achievement we naturally assume a path to <\/em>happiness:\u00c2\u00a0 get on it, do the work, and — enduring a baleful journey of indeterminate years — you will eventually arrive at bliss.\u00c2\u00a0 But there is no path to <\/em>happiness, only a path of <\/em>happiness.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, happiness is a state, not a destination.<\/p>\n — David Anderson, Breakfast Epiphanies:\u00c2\u00a0 Finding wonder in the Everyday, <\/em>p. 88-89<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I find myself planning and working for the future, for payoffs and rewards in a month or a year, for which I am willing to pay with happiness now.\u00c2\u00a0 Only to find of course that there is always another month, another year to wait.\u00c2\u00a0 True, the future must be planned for, and there are surely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-joy","category-life","category-peace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}