People who postpone happiness are like children who try chasing rainbows in an effort to find the pot of gold at the rainbows end…Your life will never be fulfilled until you are happy here and now.— Ken Keyes Jr.
We don’t need the perfect marriage, the perfect job, or the charm of monetary riches to feel happy, and if we think we do then we are lying to ourselves. Even if we were to attain everything on our list of goals, it would never satisfy our deeper hunger for happiness. These things are all brushed with the strokes of impermanence — to have, but not to hold. We think that we have to work so hard to be happy, yet why should it be such a struggle? It is the struggle itself that fills us with lack, despair and the holes of missing happiness in our hearts?
Anyone looking down on humanity may poke fun at our overwhelming failure at finding an innate state of happiness. We complicate many things, as it’s within human nature to always be battling some kind of inner confusion, like we’re constantly at war with ourselves. True happiness will always seem out of reach as long as we don’t take the time to give it real meaning, purpose, and an invitation into our present reality.
Instead of chasing the end of a rainbow we can seek out how we can belong to ourselves and evolve in our own spiritual sense of what joy is right under the rainbow. We can look within and redefine our highest hopes around something less fragile and fleeting than the grandiose accomplishments we’ve fixed our happiness to.
In other words, we can focus on what we have right now rather than what we don’t have, we can find happiness in living fully, and we can experience fulfilment when we recognize our own ability to inspire and create it — inside.