Sadness is something we’re all familiar with. Tragedy strikes. A bad day happens. Someone we love hurts us. There are millions of ways to be hurt and feel pain.

It’s much better to feel happy, to feel good about life, to feel settled. To feel comfortable. It’s wonderful when we feel that way. But life, by nature is not one of permanent bliss.

We have to deconstruct the myth of happiness. Happiness is not a thing to be had. By its nature it is fleeting and impermanent.

After all, you can have all the things you truly need, and still be unhappy: “If only I made 10K more per year, if only I could have one more child, if only I had this position at work… then I’d be happy.”

Placing your happiness on contingent factors is highly problematic. When you require external factors to bring happiness, you are placing your joy forever out of reach. Because it is a lover, someone else, who will finally make you happy. It is more money that will make you happy. It is a larger home.

Who said we’ll get what we want in life? I’m a sky’s the limit, dream-big kind of person, but I also know that the sky is full of storms and hail, and terrible pollution (at least in the city of Chicago where I live).

We don’t always get we want in life.

Happiness is the ability to be aware of what we desire, but to not see what we don’t have as lack. It is accepting that life is full of desires that aren’t always fulfilled. We will never have everything we want.

I’d like to offer an alternative meaning of happiness: Acceptance.

Acceptance means that you change what you can, and accept what you can’t change in life.

Sadness is part of that equation. Life, is by nature, difficult. The experience of being alive, of being in a body, of surviving, is hard. Happiness means admitting that. Our lives require the space for loss, grief, and disappointment. Suffering is synonymous with life.

So, true happiness is only possible when we accept that the nature of life is struggle.

All that we feel: failure, betrayal, and joy, has its place. Happiness is the contentment we find when we accept that loss, desires (both met and unmet), tragedy, and love are all one inseparable package.

And this acceptance can only be found in yourself.