Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
I was once out for a walk, back from the chiropractor I think, feeling all open and aligned. The sun was shining, a light breeze was blowing; it was, as Winnie the Pooh would have said, a hummy sort of day. I was enjoying the moment, smiling, thinking: this, now THIS is a day.
Two young men in suits (on a summer afternoon!) see me from across the street, run over to greet me.
“How would you like to have more peace in your life?”
“Actually, I’m feeling pretty peaceful already, thanks.”
“Well, but you could be MORE peaceful.”
Sorry sweetie, that’s not how it works. Whatever he was pitching, he hadn’t figured that out yet. The grasping, striving, always seeking (even the seeking of peace) actually detracts from the peace that is already there. It’s the letting go and letting in that gets you there.
There’s a reason Oprah had everybody doing those gratitude journals.
See here, Pig gets it, and Rat, for all his striving, does not:
Valerie Roney 
Happiness happens.
Douglas Adams on happiness (in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy): “This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
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Brilliant!
I love Hitchhiker for this outsider observations of our utter bloody silliness.
Happiness happens, indeed!
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