If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her own nose all the time.

Happiness resists being hunted, because hunting assumes it is somewhere else. Chase it and your attention goes to the gap between here and the better place, which is precisely the state that keeps you from noticing anything good in front of you. The search often ends with the discovery that what you needed was available all along, in unglamorous form. That is less a scolding than a relief.

Spend one day this week without trying to improve anything. Notice what is already pleasant in an ordinary hour and let that be the entire aim. The slowing down is what changes.