Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

Much of what feels like contentment is actually anticipation. The pleasure of a trip lives partly in the weeks before it, and the pleasure of a plan lives in the imagining. A good deal of happiness is borrowed from a future that never quite arrives in the form expected, which sounds like a trick and partly is, though it also carries people through stretches that offer little else.

Rather than trying to stop hoping, notice how much of your good mood is loaned from what has not happened yet. Then find one thing this week that is enjoyable on its own terms, with nothing riding on later.