Geography Of Bliss Quotes

Money matters but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

and we laugh and laugh and all I know is at this moment I feel like I can do anything I want and be anyone I want and go anywhere on the globe and still call it home

[Happiness is] a ghost, it’s a shadow. You can’t really chase it. It’s a by-product, a very pleasant side effect to a life lived well.

Maybe happiness is this: not feeling that you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.

I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.

So the greatest source of happiness is other people--and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house, and if we're really wealthy, to an estate. We think we're moving up, but really we're walling off ourselves.

a simple question to identify your true home: where do you want to die?

Part of positive psychology is about being positive, but sometimes laughter and clowns are not appropriate. Some people don't want to be happy, and that's okay. They want meaningful lives, and those are not always the same as happy lives.

We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we're counting on some future payback. There is a word for this; love.

There's no one on the island telling them they're not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write.

why can't we control our anger? because we love perfection. make a little room for imperfection in our lives.

Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.

For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that- try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn't the right country for you- just won't leave you in peace.

Some places are like family. They annoy us to no end, especially during the holidays, but we keep coming back for more because we know, deep in our hearts, that our destinies are intertwined.

I've spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself.

what doesn't kill you not only make you stronger, but also more honest.

As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energied and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of orgasm of negativity.'... The Brits don't merely enjoy misery, they get off on it.

Only a fool or philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

Ketika pohon terakhir ditebang, Ketika sungai terakhir dikosongkan, Ketika ikan terakhir ditangkap, Barulah manusia akan menyadari bahwa dia tidak dapat memakan uang.

Thinking about happiness makes us less happy.

We are shaped not only by our current geography but by our ancestral one as well. Americans, for instance, retain a frontier spirit even though the only frontier that remains is that vast open space between the SUV and strip mall. We are our past.

..there is more to life than just pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it.

Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.

Demikian pula halnya, hanya ketidakbahagiaan yang memiliki makna. Itulah sebabnya mengapa kita merasa terpaksa membicarakannya dan punya banyak kata untuk melukiskannya. Kebahagiaan tidak membutuhkan kata-kata.

Perhaps it's true you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scene of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fateful decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal.

Happiness is not a noun or a verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.

It's not what we believe that makes us happy but the act of believing. In anything.

Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps--located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq.

We need to a new word to describe Swiss happiness.

Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you just met.... In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone.

That's why we feel so disoriented, irritated even, when these touchstones from our past are altered. We don't like it when our hometown changes, even in small ways. It's unsettling. The playground! It used to be right here, I swear. Mess with our hometown, and you're messing with our past, with who we are. Nobody likes that.

I would not have done anything differently. All of the moments in my life, everyone I have met, every trip I have taken, every success I have enjoyed, every blunder I have made, every loss I have endured has been just right. I am not saying that they were all good or that they happened for a reason...but they have been right. They have been okay. As far as revelations go its pretty lame, I know. Okay is not bliss or even happiness. Okay is not the basis for a new religion or self help movement. Okay won't get me on Oprah, but okay is a start and for that I am grateful. Can I thank Bhutan for this breakthrough? It's hard to say […] It is a strange place, peculiar in ways large and small. You lose your bearings here and when that happens a crack forms in your armor. A crack large enough, if you're lucky, to let in a few shafts of light.

Religion is like a knife. If you use it the wrong way you can cut yourself.

The great thinkers have long pointed to a connection between creativity and happiness. "Happiness," Kant once said, "is an ideal not of reason but of imagination." In other words, we create our happiness, and the first step in creating anything is to imagine it.

Why do we lose our temper? Because we love perfection. Create a little room for imperfection in your life.

Paradise is a moving target.

Maybe happiness is this: not feeling like you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else. Maybe the current conditions in Switzerland . . . make it simply easier to ‘be’ and therefore ‘be happy.

Rule number one: wear loose clothing. No Problem. Rule number two: no alcohol for the next three days. Slight problem. I'll miss my evening glass of wine but figure I can go for three days without and compensate later. And the last rule: absolutely no coffee or tea or caffeine of any kind. Big problem. This rule hits me like a sucker punch and sure would have knocked me to the floor had I not been sitting there already. I'm eying the exits, plotting my escape. I knew enlightenment came at a price, but i had no idea the price was this steep. A sense of real panic sets in. How am I going to survive for the next seventy-two hours without a single cup of coffee?

The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together--you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is out there.' " In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.

Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

You must sit down to speak this language, It is so heavy you can't be polite or chatter in it. For once you have begun a sentence, the whole course of your life is laid out before you" -quoted in "The Geography of Bliss

The word "utopia" has two meanings. It means both "good place" and "nowhere". That's the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn't want to live in the perfect place, either. "A life time of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on earth," wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman.

In the former Soviet republics, there are three staples of life: vodka, chocolate, and corruption. I know someone who once survived in Uzbekistan for two weeks solely on these three items.

Everyone has their own idea of happiness.

Dia berkata bahwa ketika dia merasa sedih, dia berbicara kepada Tuhannya. Bukan berdoa, tapi berbicara. 'Berbicara' terasa alami, tidak seperti 'berdoa'.

Happiness doesn't require words.

And yet, over the years I've met so many people like Jared who seem to be more at home, happier, living in a country not of their birth. ... Not political refugees, escaping a repressing regime, nor economic refugees, crossing a border in search of a better-paying job. The are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually hedonic refugees have an ephiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country.

Humans, even nomadic ones, need a sense of home. Home need not be one place or any place at all, but every home has two essential elements: a sense of community and, even more important, a history.

How we pursue the goal of happiness matters at least as much, perhaps more, than the goal itself. They are, in fact, one and the same, means and ends. A virtuous life necessarily leads to a happy life.

Lesson number one: “Not my problem” is not a philosophy. It’s a mental illness. Right up there with pessimism. Other people’s problems are our problems. If your neighbor is laid off, you may feel as if you’ve dodged the bullet, but you haven’t. The bullet hit you as well. You just don’t feel the pain yet. Or as Ruut Veenhoven told me: “The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society.” In other words, better to be a small fish in a clean pond than a big fish in a polluted lake.

Too often when we say we feel joyful, we’re really feeling manic. There is a frenetic nature to our joy, a whiff of panic; we’re afraid the moment might end abruptly. But then there are other moments when our joy is more solidly grounded. I am not speaking of a transcendental moment, of bliss, but something less.

Perhaps love and attention are really the same thing. One can’t exist without the other. The British scholar Avner Offer calls attention “the universal currency of well-being.” Attentive people, in other words, are happy people.

It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have" ... we experience flow, a state of mind where we are so engaged in an activity that our worries evaporate and we lose track of time.

Mungkin kebahagiaan adalah ini: tidak merasa Anda harus berada di suatu tempat lain, melakukan sesuatu yang lain, menjadi orang lain.

Yang terbaik adalah menjadi setengah bijak, tidak terlalu bodoh dan terlalu pandai. Orang pandai yang pengetahuannya dalam jarang merasakan kebahagiaan di hatinya.

The measure of a society, he said, is how well it transforms pain and suffering into something worthwhile.

Without cold, there would be no coziness.

But actually these two sides go together—you cannot have what is ‘in here’ unless you have what is ‘out there.

Emma has just returned from a visit to her factory. On the floor, she has spread piles of bags. They are everywhere, and they are beautiful. I'm tempted to get naked and roll around in the pile but restrain myself. This is a forgiving place, but even the inhabitants of 1 Shanti Road have their limits.

And so I do. I have inter course, right there in the Hotel van Walsum dining room. I enjoy it very much, this unhurried dining experience. I sip my beer, stare into space, and, in general, do nothing--until the waiter brings the grilled salmon, indicating that, for now, my inter course is over.

Yes, there is something higher than happiness. Love is higher than happiness. Not only does love trump happiness, but in a competition between truth and love, love wins. We must strive for a love that does not bring distortions.

For the English, life is about not happiness but muddling through, getting by. In that sense, they are like the ancient Aztecs. When an Aztec child was born, a priest would say, “You are born into a world of suffering; suffer then and hold your peace.

Hilmar owns many books, even by Icelandic standards. The other day, when he came home with a wheelbarrowful, his five-year-old daughter looked him in the eye and implored, “Please, Daddy, please, no more books!” Hilmar has a stock answer to those who criticize his excessive book buying. “It is never a waste of time to study how other people wasted time.

Culture is the sea we swim in - so pervasive, so all-consuming, that we fail to notice its existence until we step out of it.

When the last tree is cut, When the last river is emptied, When the last fish is caught, Only then will Man realize that he can not eat money.

The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan

You can tell a lot about a country by the way people drive. Getting someone behind the wheel of a car is like putting them into deep hypnosis; their true self comes out.

(It’s a good thing the gho is so handy, because all Bhutanese men are required to wear one during business hours. Bhutan is the only country in the world with a dress code for men.)

Thai culture, while rare in its distrust of thinking, is not unique. The Inuit frown upon thinking. It indicates someone is either crazy or fiercely stubborn, neither of which is desirable.

Getting someone behind the wheel of a car is like putting them into deep hypnosis; their true self comes out. In vehicle veritas. Israelis, for instance, drive both defensively and offensively at the same time, which is, come to think of it, the way Israelis do pretty much everything.

All around me I hear the pleasant chortle of Dutch. It sounds vaguely familiar, though I can't imagine why. Then it dawns on me. Dutch sounds exactly like English spoken backward! ... I wonder if I recorded someone speaking Dutch and played that backward, it would sound like regular English!

For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that—try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn’t the right country for you—just won’t leave you in peace.

Conversely, the biophilia hypothesis, as Wilson calls it, also explains why we find natural settings so peaceful. It’s in our genes. That’s why, each year, more people visit zoos than attend all sporting events combined.

In fact, researchers have found that people who are too busy are happier than those who are not busy enough. In other words, the playwright Noël Coward got it right when he observed that interesting work is “more fun than fun.” I

Semua momen dalam kehidupan saya, setiap orang yang saya temui, semua perjalanan yang telah saya tempuh, setiap keberhasilan yang telah saya nikmati, setiap kesalahan yang telah saya buat, setiap kerugian yang saya tanggung adalah bukan masalah.

However, I do spot this hand-painted sign, propped up by two pieces of wood on the side of the road. "When the last tree is cut, When the last river is emptied, When the last fish is caught, Only then will Man realize that he can not eat money.

It is this kind of resourcefulness, I think, that explains how this hardy band of Vikings managed to survive more than one thousand years on an island that is about as hospitable to human habitation as the planet Pluto—if Pluto were a planet, that is, which it’s not.

Indeed, there was a difference, one that any Thai person could spot instantly but not most foreigners. What the Thais know instinctively is that a smile, a real smile, is not located in the lips or any other part of the mouth. A real smile is in the eyes. To be precise, the orbicularis oculi muscles that surround each eye. We cannot fool these tiny muscles. They spring to life only for a genuine smile.

Einstein, like myself, found Bern pleasant but boring. And so I wonder: If the Swiss were more interesting, might he never have daydreamed as much as he did? Might he never have developed the Special Theory of Relativity? In other words, is there something to be said for boredom?

Social scientists estimate that about 70 percent of our happiness stems from our relationships, both quantity and quality, with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. During life’s difficult patches, camaraderie blunts our misery; during the good times, it boosts our happiness.

In the nineteenth century, one hundred years before a country called Qatar existed, Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, wrote of “anomic suicide.” It’s what happens when a society’s moral underpinnings are shaken. And they can be shaken, Durkheim believed, both by great disaster and by great fortune.

Something wasn’t right though. That golden rule of positive psychology, hedonic adaptation, states that no matter what tragedy or good fortune befalls us, we adapt. We return to our “set point” or close enough anyway. It’s been fifteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why hasn’t Luba adapted?

In other words, where we are is vital to who we are. By “where,” I’m speaking not only of our physical environment but also of our cultural environment. Culture is the sea we swim in—so pervasive, so all-consuming, that we fail to notice its existence until we step out of it. It matters more than we think.

Ambition. Yes, that is my God. When Ambition is your God, the office is your temple, the employee handbook your holy book. The sacred drink, coffee, is imbibed five times a day. When you worship Ambition, there is no Sabbath, no day of rest. Every day, you rise early and kneel before the God Ambition, facing in the direction of your PC. You pray alone, always alone, even though others may be present. Ambition is a vengeful God. He will smite those who fail to worship faithfully, but that is nothing compared to what He has in store for the faithful. They suffer the worst fate of all. For it is only when they are old are tired, entombed in the corner office, that the realize hits like a Biblical thunderclap. The God Ambition is a false God and has always been.

Moldovans, most of whom will never be able to afford the products advertised—unless they sell a kidney. Joseph Epstein, in his book on envy, described the entire advertising industry as “a vast and intricate envy-producing machine.” In Moldova, all of that envy has nowhere to dissipate; it just accumulates, like so much toxic waste.

We in the west think of unpredictability as a menace, something to be avoided at all costs. We want our careers, our family lives, our roads, our weather to be utterly predictable. We love nothing more than a sure thing. Shuffling the songs on our iPod is about as much randomness as we can handle. But here is a group of rational software engineers telling me that they like unpredictability, crave it, can’t live without it. I get an inkling, not for the first time, that India lies at a spiritual latitude beyond the reach of the science of happiness. At

This, I realize, is what life is like for most Thais. They are not in control of their fates. A terrifying thought, yes, but also a liberating one. For if nothing you do matters, then life suddenly feels a lot less heavy. It’s just one big game. And as any ten-year-old will tell you, the best games are the ones where everyone gets to play. And where you can play again and again, for free. Lots of cool special effects are nice, too.

The philosopher Alan Watts, were he alive today, would nod knowingly when told of that experiment. Watts once said, “Only bad music has any meaning.” Meaning necessarily entails words, symbols. They point to something other than themselves. Good music doesn’t point anywhere. It just is. Likewise, only unhappiness has meaning. That’s why we feel compelled to talk about it and have so many words to draw upon. Happiness doesn’t require words.

I heard came from a potbellied Bhutanese hotel owner named Sanjay Penjor. GNH, Penjor told me, “means knowing your limitations; knowing how much is enough.” Free-market economics has brought much good to the world, but it goes mute when the concept of “enough” is raised. As the renegade economist E. F. Schumacher put it: “There are poor societies which have too little. But where is the rich society that says ‘Halt! We have enough!’ There is none.

Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, concludes his book The Conquest of Happiness by describing a happy person thus: “Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joy that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those who will come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.

The naturalist E. O. Wilson gave a name to this warm, fuzzy feeling I’m experiencing: biophilia. He defined it as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” Wilson argued that our connection to nature is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary past. That connection isn’t always positive. Take snakes, for instance. The chances of encountering a snake, let alone dying from a snakebite, are extraordinarily remote. Yet modern humans continue to fear snakes even more, studies have found, than car accidents or homicide or any of the dozens of other more plausible ways we might meet our demise. The fear of snakes resides deep in our primitive brain. The fear of the Long Island Expressway, while not insignificant, was added much more recently.

Some cultures, for instance, are collectivist; others are individualistic. Collectivist cultures, like Japan and other Confucian nations, value social harmony more than any one person’s happiness. Individualistic cultures, like the United States, value personal satisfaction more than communal harmony. That’s why the Japanese have a well-known expression: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In America, the nail that sticks out gets a promotion or a shot at American Idol. We are a nation of protruding nails.

How, I wonder, staring out my hotel window into black nothingness, can Icelanders possibly be happy living under this veil of darkness? I’ve always associated happy places with palm trees and beaches and blue drinks and, of course, swim-up bars. That’s paradise, right? The global travel industry certainly wants us to think so. Bliss, the ads tell us, lies someplace else, and that someplace else is sunny and eighty degrees. Always. Our language, too, reflects the palm-tree bias. Happy people have a sunny disposition and always look on the bright side of life. Unhappy people possess dark souls and black bile.

Worst of all was Freud. While not technically a brooding philosopher, Freud did much to shape our views on happiness. He once said: “The intention that Man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.” That is a remarkable statement, especially coming from a man whose ideas forged the foundation of our mental-health system. Imagine if some doctor in turn-of-the-century Vienna had declared: “The intention that Man should have a healthy body is not in the plan of Creation.” We’d probably lock him up, or at least strip him of his medical license. We certainly wouldn’t base our entire medical system on his ideas. Yet that is exactly what we did with Freud.

the Bhutanese scholar and cancer survivor. “There is no such thing as personal happiness,” he told me. “Happiness is one hundred percent relational.” At the time, I didn’t take him literally. I thought he was exaggerating to make his point: that our relationships with other people are more important than we think. But now I realize Karma meant exactly what he said. Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It’s a conjunction. Connective tissue. Well, are we there yet? Have I found happiness? I still own an obscene number of bags and am prone to debilitating bouts of hypochondria. But I do experience happy moments. I’m learning, as W. H. Auden counseled, to “dance while you can.” He didn’t say dance well, and for that I am grateful. I’m not 100 percent happy. Closer to feevty-feevty, I’d say. All things considered, that’s not so bad. No, not bad at all. Waterford, Virginia, July 2007

The way Karma Ura sees it, a government is like a pilot guiding an airplane. In bad weather, it must rely on its instruments to navigate. But what if the instruments are faulty? The plane will certainly veer off course, even though the pilot is manipulating the controls properly. That, he says, is the state of the world today, with its dependence on gross national product as the only real measure of a nation’s progress. “Take education,” he says. “We are hooked on measuring enrollment, but we don’t look at the content. Or consider a nation like Japan. People live a long time, but what is the quality of their life past age sixty?” He has a point. We measure what is easiest to measure, not what really matters to most people’s lives—a disparity that Gross National Happiness seeks to correct.

But Nozick did think long and hard about the relationship between hedonism and happiness. He once devised a thought experiment called the Experience Machine. Imagine that “superduper neuropsychologists” have figured out a way to stimulate a person’s brain in order to induce pleasurable experiences. It’s perfectly safe, no chance of a malfunction, and not harmful to your health. You would experience constant pleasure for the rest of your life. Would you do it? Would you plug into the Experience Machine? If not, argued Nozick, then you’ve just proved that there is more to life than pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it. Perhaps we even want to experience unhappiness, or at least leave open the possibility of unhappiness, in order to truly appreciate happiness.

Обича начина,по който горещата вода блика от земята подобно на геотермално злато. Обича начина, по който хората те канят на кафе без специален повод и могат да разговарят с теб в продължение на часове за всичко и за нищо специално. Обича начина, по който с любов наричат страната си "Леденото кубче". Обича факта,че без да полага никакви усилия, вече се е запознал с трима депутати от парламента. Обича начина, по който в кристалните зимни дни снегът хруска под краката ти като божествен стиропор. Обича хоровете, които пеят по тротоарите на главната търговска улица през декември, и гласовете им-силни и лъчисти, възпират нощта. Обича начина,по който петгодишните деца спокойно ходят сами на училище в мрака преди зазоряване. Обича вълшебното, неземно чувство, че плува насред снежната буря. Обича това, че когато колата ти затъне в снега, винаги някой ще спре, за да ти помогне. Обича начина,по който исландците ръкопляскат бурно, когато самолетът им каца на международното летище в Кефлавик просто защото са щастливи,че се завръщат у дома. Обича начина, по който исландците съумяват да бъдат изключително горди, но без следа от арогантност. И, да, той обича - не просто понася, - активно обича мрака.

ultimately, most of us would choose a rich and meaningful life over an empty, happy one, if such a thing is even possible. “Misery serves a purpose,” says psychologist David Myers. He’s right. Misery alerts us to dangers. It’s what spurs our imagination. As Iceland proves, misery has its own tasty appeal. A headline on the BBC’s website caught my eye the other day. It read: “Dirt Exposure Boosts Happiness.” Researchers at Bristol University in Britain treated lung-cancer patients with “friendly” bacteria found in soil, otherwise known as dirt. The patients reported feeling happier and had an improved quality of life. The research, while far from conclusive, points to an essential truth: We thrive on messiness. “The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is the great unheralded geographer of our time and a man whose writing has accompanied me throughout my journeys. He called one chapter of his autobiography “Salvation by Geography.” The title is tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly, for geography can be our salvation. We are shaped by our environment and, if you take this Taoist belief one step further, you might say we are our environment. Out there. In here. No difference. Viewed that way, life seems a lot less lonely. The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere.” That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn’t want to live in the perfect place, either. “A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on Earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: “Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise.” We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. My passport is tucked into my desk drawer again. I am relearning the pleasures of home. The simple joys of waking up in the same bed each morning. The pleasant realization that familiarity breeds contentment and not only contempt. Every now and then, though, my travels resurface and in unexpected ways. My iPod crashed the other day. I lost my entire music collection, nearly two thousand songs. In the past, I would have gone through the roof with rage. This time, though, my anger dissipated like a summer thunderstorm and, to my surprise, I found the Thai words mai pen lai on my lips. Never mind. Let it go. I am more aware of the corrosive nature of envy and try my best to squelch it before it grows. I don’t take my failures quite so hard anymore. I see beauty in a dark winter sky. I can recognize a genuine smile from twenty yards. I have a newfound appreciation for fresh fruits and vegetables. Of all the places I visited, of all the people I met, one keeps coming back to me again and again: Karma Ura,

The secret—to being you, to being Happy?” “Just keep on smiling. Even when you’re sad. Keep on smiling.” Not the most profound advice, admittedly. But Happy is wise, for only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. To venture any further, though, is to enter treacherous waters. A slippery seal, happiness is. On the road, I encountered bushels of inconsistencies. The Swiss are uptight and happy. The Thais are laid-back and happy. Icelanders find joy in their binge drinking, Moldovans only misery. Maybe an Indian mind can digest these contradictions, but mine can’t. Exasperated, I call one of the leading happiness researchers, John Helliwell. Perhaps he has some answers. “It’s simple,” he says. “There’s more than one path to happiness.” Of course. How could I have missed it? Tolstoy turned on his head. All miserable countries are alike; happy ones are happy in their own ways. It’s worth considering carbon. We wouldn’t be here without it. Carbon is the basis of all life, happy and otherwise. Carbon is also a chameleon atom. Assemble it one way—in tight, interlocking rows—and you have a diamond. Assemble it another way—a disorganized jumble—and you have a handful of soot. The arranging makes all the difference. Places are the same. It’s not the elements that matter so much as how they’re arranged and in which proportions. Arrange them one way, and you have Switzerland. Arrange them another way, and you have Moldova. Getting the balance right is important. Qatar has too much money and not enough culture. It has no way of absorbing all that cash. And then there is Iceland: a country that has no right to be happy yet is. Iceland gets the balance right. A small country but a cosmopolitan one. Dark and light. Efficient and laid-back. American gumption married to European social responsibility. A perfect, happy arrangement. The glue that holds the entire enterprise together is culture. It makes all the difference. I have some nagging doubts about my journey. I didn’t make it everywhere. Yet my doubts extend beyond matters of itinerary. I wonder if happiness is really the highest good, as Aristotle believed. Maybe Guru-ji, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is right. Maybe love is more important than happiness. Certainly, there are times when happiness seems beside the point. Ask a single, working mother if she is happy, and she’s likely to reply, “You’re not asking the right question.” Yes, we want to be happy but for the right reasons, and,