Happiness Can Be Held as a Possibility

We often speak about happiness as if it were something to obtain and keep.

That picture creates a problem immediately.

Life keeps changing.

Conditions improve and worsen. People arrive and leave. Bodies change. Successes become ordinary. New problems appear.

If happiness is a possession secured by favorable conditions, it must be repeatedly won back whenever conditions change.

Another way to hold the question is as possibility.

A possibility is not a mood we are required to maintain.

It is not a denial of grief, depression, illness, hardship, or injustice.

It is a way of refusing to make the completion of every unfinished part of life the sole condition under which happiness may appear.

This changes the inquiry.

Instead of asking, 'What must I finally get so that happiness can begin?' we can ask, 'What becomes available if happiness is not postponed until life is solved?'

Circumstances still matter.

They simply stop carrying the impossible burden of permanently securing an inner state.

Happiness may come and go as feeling.

As possibility, it does not have to wait for perfection.