We all wear different colored glasses and no two see life with the same tint.
Some find their present happiness in coarse dissipation; others in a quiet nook with a book. Some find their greatest happiness in friends, in social intercourse; others seek happiness in roving over the earth, always thinking that the greatest enjoyment is in another day, in another place, a little further on, in the next room, or to-morrow, or in another country.
To many people, happiness is never where they are, but almost anywhere else.
Most people lose sight of the simplicity of happiness. They look for it in big, complicated things. Real happiness is perfectly simple. In fact, it is incompatible with complexity. Simplicity is its very essence.
I was dining recently with a particularly successful young man who is trying very hard to be happy, but he takes such a complicated, strenuous view of everything that his happiness is always flying from him. He drives everything so fiercely, his life is so vigorous, so complicated, that happiness can not find a home with him very long. Nor does he understand why. He has money, health; but he always has that restless far-away, absent-minded gaze into something beyond, and I do not think he is ever really very happy. His whole manner of living is extremely complex. He does not seem to know where to find happiness. He has evidently mistaken the very nature of happiness. He thinks it consists in making a great show, in having great possessions, in doing things which attract a great deal of attention; but happiness would be strangled, suffocated in such an environment. The essentials of real happiness are few, simple, and close at hand.
Happiness is made up of very simple ingredients. It flees from the complex life. It evades pomp and show. The heart would starve amid the greatest luxuries.
Simple joys and the treasures of the heart and mind make happiness.
Happiness has very little to do with material things. It is a mental state of mind. Real permanent happiness can not be found in mere temporary things, because its roots reach away down into eternal principles.
One of the most pathetic pictures in civilization is the great army of men and women searching the world over for happiness, as though it existed in things rather than in a state of mind.
The people who have spent years and a fortune trying to find it look as hungry and as lean of contentment and all that makes life desirable as when they started out. Chasing happiness all over the world is about as silly a business as any human being ever engaged in, for it was never yet found by any pursuer. Yet happiness is the simplest thing in the world. It is found in many a home with carpetless floors and pictureless walls. It knows neither rank, station, nor color, nor does it recognize wealth. It only demands that it live with a contented mind and pure heart. It will not live with ostentation; it flees from pretense; it loves the simple life; it insists upon a sweet, healthful, natural environment. It hates the forced and complicated and formal.