What is it you are afraid of? You don’t even know, not really. You are afraid of possibilities, poverty, old age, loneliness, ill health, your death, death of others, and life. You fear life. You fear developments. You accumulate inadequacies. What are you afraid of, dear ones?
And what do you want? What would make you happy?
You may answer that if so and so loved you, you would be happy. Yet that would not be enough. Love on Earth, your dream of it, may have escaped you. You think of your dream, perhaps, as winning, as victory, and yet individual love, in the long run, is not always fulfilling or fulfilling enough.
You intellectually know that financial wealth is not enough to give you happiness. You already know that and yet you covet wealth as if it were the answer to all that you find difficult. I bless you to have wealth. In the long run, you with wealth and you without wealth are the same.
It is you yourself who is difficult. You and you alone stand in the way of your own happiness. Perhaps you are a pouter. Even if all your desires were fulfilled in your lifetime, you might feel: “Why didn’t they come sooner? Why did I have to wait so long for them? Why did I have to go without them for so long and struggle for them? Why couldn’t I have had happiness anyway?”
And that is what I ask you: “Why couldn’t you have been happier sooner with or without whatever you wanted? Why couldn’t your own love be enough? Why did you set up barriers to your loving yourself? Why did you put off happiness, making it dependent upon this or that?”
Perhaps you delay happiness now. What prevents you from happiness? Why do you feel or have you felt that it is beyond you? What makes you think that your happiness is dependent upon something outside you when your happiness is dependent upon you?
Why does someone’s lack of love for you trail you and run before you? What are you running from and what are you running to?
Never mind what is around the corner. What is with you now?
If you really believed that time is not real, would you wait for another time to hold happiness in your heart?
What are you waiting for?
Certainly, it always seems that if only you had this…or if only you had that… you would be happy, deliriously happy, yet would you?
What is this factor called happiness and why, oh, why, don’t you already have it?
I say it is yours. I say you can have it. You say you chase it, and it eludes you.
Where is this Bluebird of Happiness? It is said to be in your own backyard.
You may already have it and be the last to know. You may have hidden it from yourself. Happiness exists, and it exists within you, and all you have to do is to pull it out from where you put it. Happiness is yours. Admit it. Usher it into your heart.
If you were to be happy right now, what would have to be different? Only you, beloved. Only you. You would have to see differently. You would have to notice your good fortune.
And, yet, you ask yourself different things. You may ask yourself: “How can I be homeless and happy?”
What if you removed thoughts just like that and changed them to: “I can be homeless and happy. Having a home wasn’t enough to keep me happy, why does absence of anything have to make me unhappy?”
Beloveds, what are you looking for? Happiness or unhappiness? What do you find? Happiness or unhappiness? What bedtime stories do you tell yourself?
What if you could be happy or happy enough to last a day? If you can have happiness one day, why not another? And another and another.
Why hang on to unhappiness when you could have happiness? Why, oh, why, I ask you.