Chasing Happiness

It is always around the corner. Just a bit out of reach. I tell myself I will find it "if only". If only I could become the perfect housekeeper, homeschooling mama, wife, mother, friend, daughter, etc... If only I could just get my health under control. If only I could change who I am. If only....

I will find it in the next move or the next job promotion. I will find it when our household income exceeds this dollar amount. I will find it when we live in a tiny house, or a house with acreage, or in New Mexico, Idaho, Montana (or any other place I have been to that truly captured my heart.) I will find happiness once I can take our whole family to Cape Cod again.

I cannot grasp it fully. This feeling of happiness has been a life long quest. It is exhausting. And wears out those closest to me.

I read of a continued feeling of happiness. That it is a choice. That my sustained desire for it is not out of my reach like I think it is, but rather within myself. It is a mind set.  And I begin to wonder if my mind is not set and wired to hold on to that feeling for more than a fleeting moment. Because I DO feel it. Here and there. And when I feel it it feels amazing, but it leaves me so, so quickly. And so I criticize myself. I have so much to be happy about. What is wrong with me that I cannot live in an almost perpetual state of contentment?

Maybe instead of chasing this elusive feeling I should be asking myself what makes me feel happy? Maybe instead of suffocating the emotion when I feel it by trying to hold on to it I should instead stop and look at the environment that I am in and what is going on around me that is making me feel so good?

I am 39 years old. That number doesn't scare me. I don't fear growing older. I have earned my age. And I look forward to the years ahead of me. But I need to figure out this happiness thing because I don't want to spend the next 39 years chasing after something that is always seemingly at the tip of my fingers, but never within my grasp. It takes up too much of my energy and robs me of too much. But I don't want to spend the rest of my life without that feeling either. Something's got to give. I just don't know what.