“Where can I find happiness?” This is the wrong question. It sounds like happiness is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If I run faster and try harder maybe I can find where someone hid it. But what if the question is: “What is keeping me from experiencing happiness?” This is the way Jim Taylor Ph.D put it on a blog post in Psychology Today in September 2012. Dr. Taylor writes, “I feel that we’re trying way too hard to achieve happiness. Most people have come to see it as a goal to accomplish, like all of the other aspirations (e.g., wealth, celebrity, beauty, power) that our culture tries to foist on us. But, in truth, happiness is not a condition that we can actively strive for, b
I read an article recently entitled “Abandon Hope.” At first I didn’t want to read it because I thought the title was pretty depressing. But my curiosity got the better of me. The article was about how often many of us put off living because we fantasize about some vague time in the future when all will be well. We live in the mistaken belief that somewhere in the future all of my problems will be solved and life will be easy. My particular fantasy has something to do with winning the lottery. Now I am not greedy. I never buy the trillion dollar power ball ticket. I have more modest and humble fantasies; just a couple of million dollars would do nicely. Then, I dream about living a life of e
