Post by West Midland Abbey (@WEST1)

Waiting for success before you allow yourself to be happy is like refusing to breathe until you reach the top of the mountain. By the time you get there, you may have forgotten how to breathe altogether. Family, grab your glasses if you wear one like me, and let us talk honestly about something most of us take for granted. Happiness.

What Is Happiness?
Happiness is not a temporary feeling that comes and goes with your circumstances. It is a permanent inner state that can exist even in the middle of chaos, uncertainty, and unfinished seasons of life. It is not the absence of difficulty. It is the presence of peace in spite of it. And that distinction is one that most of us have never truly sat with long enough to understand.

The Quiet Agreement We Never Signed
Many of us are living with a condition we never consciously chose. We told ourselves that happiness comes after. After the promotion. After graduating. After the business works. After the house is built. After marriage, after children, after life finally arranges itself into the shape we always imagined. And so we wait, always promising joy to ourselves just around the corner, just after this one thing.

In psychology this pattern has a name. It is called the arrival fallacy, coined by Harvard trained positive psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar. It describes the deeply human tendency to believe that happiness is waiting for us at the next destination, only to discover when we arrive that the feeling is fleeting and the goalpost has quietly moved even further ahead.

What This Does to Our Mind
Family, let us be honest with each other. This message is not just encouraging us to be happy. It is also about revealing something important about the way the mind works. As James Allen wisely said, we are the masters of our own minds.

The mind faithfully follows whatever instruction we give it. When we repeatedly tell our minds that happiness belongs to the future, the mind obeys without question. It stops looking for reasons to rejoice now. It simply waits. And when waiting becomes a habit, three things begin to happen quietly beneath the surface of our daily lives.

◆The brain learns to defer. It stops treating today as a legitimate place for joy. A quiet dissatisfaction takes root and nothing ever feels fully enough, even when genuinely good things are happening all around us.

◆We become strangers to our own lives. We are always preparing to live, never actually living. We are physically present but mentally somewhere else entirely, and the people closest to us feel that absence even when we are standing right beside them.

◆ Our identity becomes dangerously tied to the next achievement.** So when a setback comes, and setbacks always come, it does not just disrupt our plans. It shakes who we believe we are at the core. Because we built our sense of self entirely on what was coming rather than on what was already here.

This is the quiet tragedy of a happiness that is always postponed. It promises a future that never fully arrives and in the waiting it silently steals the only life that was ever truly available to us. The one we are living right now.

A Final Word
Like a flower that refuses to open until every condition is perfect, there is a deep and quiet sadness in waiting to be happy. And here is what I want to leave with you today. Achieving great things brings a genuine sense of fulfilment and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But lasting happiness is not something you earn at the finish line. It is something you already carry within you. Every achievement only adds to the joy you have already allowed yourself to feel. It can never replace or recover the joy you refused to accept in the first place.

So regardless of the challenges you are facing today, and regardless of what you are still believing and hoping for tomorrow, treasure what you already have. Treasure the people around you. Treasure your health, your progress, your ordinary mornings, and the simple fact that you are still here and still trying. Be truly content with where you are, even as you reach faithfully for where you are going.

My prayer for every single one of us is simple. May you be given a reason to be happy today, and if you cannot find one yet, may you have the grace to look a little closer at the life you are already living. Peace. 🤍

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