The Source of Happiness

What is the path to enduring happiness?  Is it by achieving wealth or fame? Maintaining good health? Staying close to your family, or your faith?

My Angel atop Angel's Rest

Each of these can contribute to happiness. But none is essential, and ultimately none is sufficient. They are stones – which may be a foundation for happiness, or hurled as weapons against it. 

Wealth is a wonderful enabler.  It can help you see the world, and perhaps make a positive difference in it.  But wealth may also engender a sense of entitlement, and can alienate us from those who have less. 

Fame is an attractive goal, but one which—once attained—often becomes a trap from which many famous people would gladly flee to anonymity.

Good health is appreciated most when it is absent, or newly regained. The novelty of mobility, or a pain-free easy breath is short-lived, and soon taken for granted.  

Our families can be our foundation of strength, but may also be the dull knife that reopens painful childhood wounds.

And faith—which we would look to as the ultimate font of happiness—sometimes serves instead as a forum from which prejudice, chauvinism, and hatred are expressed and reinforced. Religious faith has inspired incredible generosity and sacrifice; but has also been the driving force behind some of the most vicious acts of pitiless cruelty in history.

Each of these stones can be part of the foundation of true happiness, but on their own, they are not stable.

Whether one possesses but one of these, all of them, or none at all, a spirit focused on gratitude for that endowment is the mortar which holds them together. And a spirit of generosity—the natural extension of that gratitude—is the glue that creates families, communities, and ultimately unites us all as human beings.