Mõte

"The only thing absolutely necessary for your happiness is your own existence. However, you only experience happiness to the degree that you allow yourself to receive, in the depth of your being, the good available in the present moment, with everything exactly the way it is. Again, this is a skill and you can get better at it.

That people find so much to complain about is not a sign of how bad their lives are but a sign of how poor their skill of happiness is. What does it take to enjoy every moment unconditionally? What is this skill of happiness? Simply put, it is the skill of not making yourself unhappy. You don’t have to do anything special to enjoy something. Because your existence is miraculous, enjoyment is natural and available at every moment.

In order to not enjoy something, you must block your awareness of what is good about it, and block your awareness that existence itself is fundamentally good. People do this by insisting that what they are experiencing should be different from how it is. Doing so separates them from the reality of their situation and shifts their attention from the good in what they’re experiencing to the gap between how it is and how it should be. The term I use for this is make-wrong. You make something wrong when you compare it to an imaginary standard, such as how it should be, how you wish it were, what somebody else has, how good things used to be back in the good old days, and so on.

I’m sure you’ve noticed, by this point in your life, that things are not the way you think they should be. Things are the way they are. Your ability to be happy depends on your ability to be in harmony with reality as it is. This does not mean you give up making things better; quite the opposite. But consider this: Even if you succeed at making things better five minutes from now, that does you no good right now. Only your ability to improve your relationship to things as they are right now can make you happier." 

• JimLeonard